1) Freenas as VM: long run experiences. - 2) Freenas as vm in hyperconverged infrastructure.

Sisko214

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Aug 11, 2020
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Hello everybody,
I am evaluating to deploy a freenas as a straight vm, in a production environment as smb fileserver for a small group of people (about 25 clients).
Basically i need a lot of snapshots (10 x working day and 3 month retention), and zfs look to be the only able to handle them quite well.
Will be a vm without pci passtrough, and zfs pool will be set without dedupe and compression.
So, i would like to know the experiences, bad an good, of someone who has run freenas as plain vm in a similar condition, for long time.
Of course, following suggestion on blog "Yes you can virtualize freenas", but without disk controller pci passtrough, just vmdk virtual disk.
Another question.
Has someone experiences with freenas for same purpose as above but in a hyperconverged infrastructure, like HP simplivity (former omnistack) or Nutanix ?
Thanks a lot for your time and patience about my long post.
 

Evertb1

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May 31, 2016
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but without disk controller pci passtrough,
I run FreeNAS for over a year in a VM (ESXi) and I respected always one thing: ZFS needs direct control over the disk(s). I did not feel the need to proof otherwise. My data is precious to me. Running the VM it self from a virtual disk should not be a problem as long as FreeNAS/ZFS has control over the hardware with the ZFS pool. And I think that means PCIe passtrough of the hardware to the FreeNAS VM.
 
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Sisko214

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...ZFS needs direct control over the disk(s). I did not feel the need to proof otherwise...
Thanks for your answer.
Yes, i know zfs require access to disk, but i can't. The storage subsystem is based on a proprietary hardware, because already has its own compression, deduplication, realtime redundancy and so on.
This is also the reason why I would configure a zfs pool without any deduplication and compression.
 

Patrick M. Hausen

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Why do you want to run FreeNAS if you have a storage system that does all this?
 

Sisko214

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Because it is a san storage that works only with vmware, and so, i need a smb gateway for a small group of people that are using different operating systems on their clients. Some of them prefers mac os, others windows or linux.
Freenas, and more precisely zfs is a perfect solution because its snapshots can be exposed as a read only subdirectory, so the people of this group, can restore their files when they needs (let's say for a previous version or for a accidentaly delete).
Yes Windows server can do that, but it is a bit limiting for a mixed environement, and also i don't like that a windows user could restore a entire snapshot and not only their files. Sure, this can be limited with some setting on the AD server, but they are just a bunch of tricks... if a user get a right permission can do it and can be dangerous. In this condition Freenas is perfect, zfs snapshot are read only, and nothing can change it, and only a administrator user can access to the gui, and delete a snapshot.
 

blanchet

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Apr 17, 2018
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If the VMware datastores are hosted by an enterprise storage system, then I think that FreeNAS or any other storage appliance that uses only vdisks should work on top of VMware without major issues. Of course, because of the vdisks, it would be slower, but it should work.

On the other hand for an HCI architecture, you may evaluate FreeNAS versus the specific solution of the HCI vendor, to see that you prefer:

Search for "Virtual Storage Appliance" on Reddit to get some testimonials.
 

Sisko214

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Aug 11, 2020
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Thanks @blanchet for you anwser. Well, i am confident an enterprise hci storage could handle quite well any data on it when is certified for a specific environment like vmware.
What I'm trying to figure out, by other users experiences, is how well a fully virtualized ZFS (Freenas specifically) contained in enterprise-class storage, works, and how works in the long term, let's say 3-5 years.
I would like to know if anyone has ever had a situation similar to this, and what problems (in terms of data lost/relibability, if they had any of course) did they have .
 
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