Volume issues after power loss -- NEED HELP

[VMGuy]

Hello,

I have a FreeNAS 9.10.2-U4 VM running on ESXi 6.0 (Latest Patch Level) running in a lab environment. We had a power outage last night, and the server went down hard, and it wasn't on UPS yet. The server itself is healthy, and all of the other VMs are fine, except for FreeNAS. After the power hit, the primary NFS share that holds all of our VMs is no longer available. The issue appears to be with the "Faulted" vol2 volume. The full path to the "VMs" NFS share that is having problems is "/mnt/vol2/VMs".

I've read numerous postings on this site, and am posting relevant information that people have asked for before. Please advise if there is any other information that would assist.

Attached you will find four files showing the:
1) Screenshot of VM Configuration (Shows disks)
2) Screenshot of volumes (shows vol2 issues)
3) Various zpool cli commands showing additional information
4) Critical System Alert messages

My gut is telling me to try a "zpool import -f", but being new to FreeNAS, I have not attempted anything as I have no doubt that others on this forum have more knowledge than I with FreeNAS.

I'm hoping someone can advise on next steps to possibly recovering from this issue.

Thank you in advance for whatever assistance you can provide.

 

[m0nkey_]

Is the pool on a proper passed through device, such as a LSI HBA? Or did you use some kind of VMware hackery to give it a drive?

 

[VMGuy]

There is no pass-thru to a LSI HBA... It's just a carved out VMware disk within vSphere for the VM. So, it's backed by a .VMDK file in the vSphere datastore, which is local to the server.

 

[m0nkey_]

There is no pass-thru to a LSI HBA... It's just a carved out VMware disk within vSphere for the VM. So, it's backed by a .VMDK file in the vSphere datastore, which is local to the server.

The likelihood of recovering is going to be very small. When virtualizing FreeNAS, drives must be presented as directly attached physical drives. Using VMware's RDM or VMDKs is the worst case scenario and should only be used for testing purposes.

 

[SweetAndLow]

There is no pass-thru to a LSI HBA... It's just a carved out VMware disk within vSphere for the VM. So, it's backed by a .VMDK file in the vSphere datastore, which is local to the server.

Lol the pool is hosed. Not going to get this one back, you can't use vmdks for zfs disks.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Dice]

Unfortunately this is the typical "how not to do it".
If you still want to run FN virtualized, you'll need to do some reading on the forums (search is your friend).

 

[Spearfoot]

Hello,

I have a FreeNAS 9.10.2-U4 VM running on ESXi 6.0 (Latest Patch Level) running in a lab environment. We had a power outage last night, and the server went down hard, and it wasn't on UPS yet. The server itself is healthy, and all of the other VMs are fine, except for FreeNAS. After the power hit, the primary NFS share that holds all of our VMs is no longer available. The issue appears to be with the "Faulted" vol2 volume. The full path to the "VMs" NFS share that is having problems is "/mnt/vol2/VMs".

I've read numerous postings on this site, and am posting relevant information that people have asked for before. Please advise if there is any other information that would assist.

Attached you will find four files showing the:
1) Screenshot of VM Configuration (Shows disks)
2) Screenshot of volumes (shows vol2 issues)
3) Various zpool cli commands showing additional information
4) Critical System Alert messages

My gut is telling me to try a "zpool import -f", but being new to FreeNAS, I have not attempted anything as I have no doubt that others on this forum have more knowledge than I with FreeNAS.

I'm hoping someone can advise on next steps to possibly recovering from this issue.

Thank you in advance for whatever assistance you can provide.

It's a free country, and you can do anything you please with your systems, including using VMDK 'disks' with your FreeNAS VM. In fact, I use just this kind of setup as a 'FreeNAS Sandbox': a FreeNAS VM with 8 small (8GB) ESXi disks. But I use it only for tinkering and experimentation and to 'make mistakes' on; I would never dream of using such a configuration for important data.

On the other hand... if you want a FreeNAS-on-ESXi 'All-In-One' (AIO) system to work reliably, you really need to passthrough an HBA to the FreeNAS VM so that it has direct access to the disks. That way you can set up redundant data storage with all of the protections afforded by ZFS. In addition to standard file-sharing and the other NAS features of FreeNAS, you can configure the FreeNAS VM to provide datastores for additional VMs (as you know). I have 3 such AIO systems; see 'my systems' below for details.

Here is forum member @Benjamin Bryan's excellent article on the subject: "FreeNAS 9.10 on VMware ESXi 6.0 Guide". There is also quite a bit of related information here on the forum.


Good luck.