I have had for a while now an install of FreeNAS 11.2 (most recently U4) on a re-purposed Intel i7 4970K with 16 GB of RAM, 3x mixed size WD Purple hard drives (started with what I have and will slowly increase drives to match size) in Raid Z, 1x 1TB Purple hard drive stand-alone for misc non-important storage, and 1x 1TB Purple hard drive standalone for surveillance recording. I ran 2 VMs - Win10 Pro running Milestone XProtect VMS surveillance software, and Ubuntu 16.04LTS server hosting docker containers for my HomeAssistant automation system and NGINX), and 1 iocage jail for Plex. Everything worked great except my Win10 VM was a bit laggy and required regular reboots because my available resources for it were a little anemic. I had no issues with my Ubuntu VM or my Plex jail, they just worked. I researched my Win10 VM and it seems to be widely accepted that bhyve isn't the best hypervisor when it comes to Win10 if there is heavy I/O on the hard drive due to its poor drivers for HDD, so I started looking into ESXI as a baremetal host.
I picked up a Dell R720 server for $350 on eBay with dual E5-2640 2.5GHz 8-Core Processors, 48GB of RAM and an H310 mini HBA flashed to IT mode, and a network card with 4 Gigabit network ports. I installed an 500GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe on a PCIe 3.0 carrier card and used it as my primary datastore for the VMs. I am booting ESXI of a 16GB SanDisk Cruzer 16GB drive on the internal USB. I used the vmware converter software to mirror my Ubuntu and Win10 VMs to ESXI and disabled them in FreeNAS with no issues. I then installed FreeNAS 11.2 U5 as a new VM with the H310 passed through to FreeNAS, which booted up fine. I backed up my configuration and powered down my old FreeNAS machine and moved the hard drives over to the hotswap bays connected to my H310 HBA. I restored my configuration for FreeNAS and rebooted the FreeNAS VM. It booted fine and found all my drives. I had to use the ESXI console and reset the network settings to a static IP since it didn't recognize the new network hardware. Now that I could enter the web GUI via IP address I checked it out and it sees all of my drives and my SMB shares are accessible. So far so good.
Now that the specs and introduction have been explained, down to the nitty-gritty of my concerns. Some of my dashboard cards like Network Info, CPU Usage, CPU Temperature, and Memory Usage are all blank and have a blue light flashing left to right at the top of the card like its "thinking". The NIC address and name are shown for Network, but no bandwidth. My Plex jail wouldn't connect to DHCP (I have reservation set up in my DHCP server) and I had to change it to static. Now that Plex is working I keep getting disconnected on my clients with an error message that my "connection to the server is not fast enough" which I never had seen with my old hardware. I even added a second network connection to my 4-port NIC and configured to load balance in the host, but no change.
I have read through hundreds of posts now about setting the virtualization options in the BIOS, setting the vSwitch settings in ESXI, and configuring jail settings, but can't find a solution to my primary concern of Plex network issues, but also to the the dashboard problems which may be related. I tried creating Plex in my Ubuntu VM and connecting via NFS shares to FreeNAS, but the NFS shares keep disconnecting which leads me back to network issues in FreeNAS. My Ubuntu VM has no network issues other than staying connected to the NFS share.
Is there a problem with the R720 and compatibility with nesting virtualization (Jail in FreeNAS in ESXI). I have read many posts of people using R710. I chose the R720 for the newer hardware, and hopefully more compatibility options for NVMe and such.
Also, I'm hoping to upgrade my boot device to a PCI carrier with dual m.2 sata drives in a RAID0 array (via onboard RAID Controller) for redundancy and use the extra storage as a datastore for VM images and files, not booting VMs though. Any input on this idea?
I picked up a Dell R720 server for $350 on eBay with dual E5-2640 2.5GHz 8-Core Processors, 48GB of RAM and an H310 mini HBA flashed to IT mode, and a network card with 4 Gigabit network ports. I installed an 500GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe on a PCIe 3.0 carrier card and used it as my primary datastore for the VMs. I am booting ESXI of a 16GB SanDisk Cruzer 16GB drive on the internal USB. I used the vmware converter software to mirror my Ubuntu and Win10 VMs to ESXI and disabled them in FreeNAS with no issues. I then installed FreeNAS 11.2 U5 as a new VM with the H310 passed through to FreeNAS, which booted up fine. I backed up my configuration and powered down my old FreeNAS machine and moved the hard drives over to the hotswap bays connected to my H310 HBA. I restored my configuration for FreeNAS and rebooted the FreeNAS VM. It booted fine and found all my drives. I had to use the ESXI console and reset the network settings to a static IP since it didn't recognize the new network hardware. Now that I could enter the web GUI via IP address I checked it out and it sees all of my drives and my SMB shares are accessible. So far so good.
Now that the specs and introduction have been explained, down to the nitty-gritty of my concerns. Some of my dashboard cards like Network Info, CPU Usage, CPU Temperature, and Memory Usage are all blank and have a blue light flashing left to right at the top of the card like its "thinking". The NIC address and name are shown for Network, but no bandwidth. My Plex jail wouldn't connect to DHCP (I have reservation set up in my DHCP server) and I had to change it to static. Now that Plex is working I keep getting disconnected on my clients with an error message that my "connection to the server is not fast enough" which I never had seen with my old hardware. I even added a second network connection to my 4-port NIC and configured to load balance in the host, but no change.
I have read through hundreds of posts now about setting the virtualization options in the BIOS, setting the vSwitch settings in ESXI, and configuring jail settings, but can't find a solution to my primary concern of Plex network issues, but also to the the dashboard problems which may be related. I tried creating Plex in my Ubuntu VM and connecting via NFS shares to FreeNAS, but the NFS shares keep disconnecting which leads me back to network issues in FreeNAS. My Ubuntu VM has no network issues other than staying connected to the NFS share.
Is there a problem with the R720 and compatibility with nesting virtualization (Jail in FreeNAS in ESXI). I have read many posts of people using R710. I chose the R720 for the newer hardware, and hopefully more compatibility options for NVMe and such.
Also, I'm hoping to upgrade my boot device to a PCI carrier with dual m.2 sata drives in a RAID0 array (via onboard RAID Controller) for redundancy and use the extra storage as a datastore for VM images and files, not booting VMs though. Any input on this idea?