1 PC for FreeNAS and Windows 7

[unbitr]

Hello,

I have a pretty powerful PC with a lot of SATA ports. Wonder if I can set one hard disk aside for Windows and the rest for FreeNAS? I have snooped around but I have not seen a guide that allows me to do this. Any advise? Thanks in advance!

 

[praecorloth]

Yes, you can! ... But should you?

If you fire up a VM on say VirtualBox and pass your other drives to that VM, and let the FreeNAS VM do it's thing with the drives. I personally would find it irritating, just because I don't like how virtual machine applications work in Windows. There's always a Window open in the task bar. But it would allow you to take advantage of ZFS features without running a second machine.

 

[cyberjock]

It's not recommended for alot of reasons. Mostly because ZFS really needs direct disk access, which means that you shouldn't run it in a VM. Of course, VMs are perfect for experimenting but for real data.. never trust it.

 

[survive]

Hi unbitr,

I'm with praecorloth on this.....sure you could, but what would be the point?

Unless you are looking to do some learning or testing with FreeNAS to see of it's something you want to use it just seems like a silly thing to do.

If you can provide some more details about what you actually hope to do with this "combo box" we can certainly help you sort out the best way to accomplish what you want, but right now, to be blunt, it seems like you are wanting to do this without really knowing what FreeNAS is for.

-Will

 

[moralesmike]

Not to hijack the thread, but this is the million dollar question for me at the moment. I have an interesting use case.

I have built a powerful AMD 8 core machine with the intent of doing a few things with it. My requirements are the machine has to do the following:

1) Be able to access an instance of Windows 7 from the connected monitors and keyboard, (This computer/server is in home office and needs to be used by my wife and kid). OS installed on SSD connected to Motherboard SATA
2) Manage a disk share that resides in the box, will be zpool made up of (vdev:3x 2TB drives in RaidZ1), with the ability to do a ZFS file structure. (Where I plan to use FreeNAS) If I have not completely messed up my though pattern this is then essentualy a SAN.
3) Another OS on VM for all media services (Plex, Sickbeard, couchpotato, etc) (OS loaded on SAN created from FreeNAS
4) All these tasks need to be done from single box.
5) All instances to work independent of each other to allow shutdown or restart of each component

With this in mind my first route was to use type1 Hypervisor (esxi 5) and I was enthralled with this until I found I can not meet my first criteria if I do this, (instance of WIN7 available to use on the same machine). I was bummed beyond belief because I relay wanted this to work. I was going to go down this road, just substituting FreeNAS for openindianna/Napp-it: http://www.napp-it.o...e/index_en.html

Adjusting my criteria and making #5 not as important led me to type2 hypervisor and what I believe unbitr wants to do.

My questions:

Q1) If I leave the drives connected to my MB SATA will FreeNAS be able to control the drives and create the "physical" vdev in raidz and manage the zpool?
Q1.1) Since the drives are on the host WIN7 machine MB would WIN7 then be seeing the drives at the same level FreeNAS does?
Q1.2) Would this cause any problems if so?
Q2) Would putting drives on a SAS/SATA card help to not have a conflict?
Q2.1) Am I correct in assuming I would then need to pass through the SASS/SATA card to the FreeNAS VM?
Q2.2) Is there a way to do pci passthrough in a type2 hypervisor?

Again I am sorry for hijacking the thread, I just did not want to start a new post.

Mike

 

[joeschmuck]

To the OP: I agree with the group that running both FreeNAS and Windows 7 (any version) on the same machine is likely to be problematic but it certainly can be done. I myself run VMWare Workstation on my home computer (Windows 7) and "Play" with FreeNAS, crate a dozen virtual drives, test new versions of the software, etc... The problem with this method is if you need to reboot Windows due to a software update or whatever, you FreeNAS machine goes down too.

The work around to this is to create a VM on the base machine, I've never done this but VMWare ESXi server is free and I believe that is what it does. This becomes the base OS for your computer hardware and then you build VMs for Windows 7 and FreeNAS. You link real hard drives to each VM. This gets you around having to reboot the actual PC when you need to reboot Windows 7. I'd like to test this and probably will the next time I upgrade my main computer but since it's a monster right now, unless there is a MB or CPU failure I just don't see replacing it for at least 3-5 years. Technology just isn't jumping like it use to and I would replace my computer every 2 years.

 

[moralesmike]

joeschmuck you say you "play" with this configuration, in VMWare Workstation, is the reboot of the NAS with the machine the only real problem you are seeing? Or are there other trade-offs? I currently have my WIN7 machine always on and have it reboot every few days at 3am. I could live with the NAS being down when the machine is rebooted. what I can't live with is data loss due to the raid not being a "proper" disk raid, or throughput issues that are sub 20mb/s or so (don't think that should be an issue). I would love your feedback. Are there any stability issues that you have seen?

 

[cyberjock]

joeschmuck you say you "play" with this configuration, in VMWare Workstation, is the reboot of the NAS with the machine the only real problem you are seeing? Or are there other trade-offs? I currently have my WIN7 machine always on and have it reboot every few days at 3am. I could live with the NAS being down when the machine is rebooted. what I can't live with is data loss due to the raid not being a "proper" disk raid, or throughput issues that are sub 20mb/s or so (don't think that should be an issue). I would love your feedback. Are there any stability issues that you have seen?

ZFS really needs direct disk access. That's just not possible using Windows as a host. Can it be done, yes. That's how joeschmuck does his experimenting. But this has been discussed ALOT, and your data is at risk if things get ugly because of the extra layer of virtualization. The extra layer of virtualization goes against what ZFS was designed to do. Because you are asking this question my advice is to not try virtualization at all except to experiment with FreeNAS to see how it works. Too many people have lost data because they thought "can" means "ok to do" and it doesn't. I can jump off a bridge, go rob a bank, etc but just because I have the ability to do these things does not mean I should do them. It's just not a smart decision. If you don't have good backups of the data its even more stupid.

 

[joeschmuck]

@moralesmike
I think you missed my point, I use VMWare Workstation for testing ONLY, and VMWare Workstation is not free, nor cheap but it's a fantastic tool for testing/development. My real NAS is a separate computer and I personally would not trust any of my data to a VM running on Windows. The only way I could see you using a single computer to run both FreeNAS and Windows would be to use VMWare ESXi. I've never used it so I recommend a lot of reading. I know the computer center at my place of employment uses VMs in this manner as it reduces a lot of costs in a short period of time by fully utilizing system hardware to near 100% capacity vice letting it sit idle. That's another story.

As CyberJock said, having direct disk access is highly recommended and I'm not sure how ESXi handles this but I believe it allows direct disk access.

I for one do not want to give you any statement that ESXi is the proper path for you. You will need to do some reading to figure that out but if you have an old computer laying around with ~8GB RAM, you could have a decent NAS.