Add datasets to Boot drive (System, Jails, ...)?

[monarchdodra]

So, pre-9.3, Freenas formatted the entire install media for itself. This precluded doing anything on said media, and hence the USB/CF recommendation.

As of 9.3 though, things have changed, in the sense that the intal media is formatted with ZFS, meaning that even though the entire drive is used for the boot "partition", this is a perfectly safe and use-able ZPool.

In particular, what I'm thinking is, if we install FreeNas to an SSD drive, what is now to stop us from using the "Boot pool" to add, say, our "Jails" "Pool", or more interestingly, our "System datasets"...

I mean, am I wrong to think that *now*, the whole "install on a small USB/CF" is a thing of the past? I realize there'd be some limitations (you can't administer the pool itself), I definitely don't see why we can't use the drive for our own data-sets. It seems stupid to me that I currently have a USB stick with freenas boot, when I have a perfectly valid SSD drive for SWAP and Jails just waiting to be used...

Is there something I am not seeing here? Should I file an enhancement request?

 

[dlavigne]

On the one hand, you're no longer limited to a fix-sized, non-mounted boot device.

On the other hand, it is a good thing to have the OS separate from storage.

While a user can define for themselves what they want their separation to be (eg are logs and jails storage?), it's doubtful that the project will recommend that anything other than the OS belongs on the boot device...

 

[snicke]

Waking up this old thread again...

I would like to get an SSD and use it as a combination of boot drive and as a storage drive for jails. I mean, if you backup you FreeNAS configuration file (which you should) and are not afraid to lose the jails on the same SSD as a result of failure of the SSD, then why not?

Anyone tested this and knows how it can be done? I'm planning to build an Intel Skylake system with 8 HDDs. But since the USB ports on the Supermicro Skylake motherboard only work with XHCI driver, that are not currently supported by FreeNAS, I need to boot from an SSD (or possibly SATA DOM). Now the 8 SATA ports of the Supermicro motherboards are to be used by my 8 HDDs in the storage pool so I'm planning to plugin a PCIe SSD in the M.2 port and use that as boot drive (at least until the XHCI driver is in place in FreeNAS but why change then?). However, I cannot find any small M.2 PCIe drives at my local distributors and the bigger ones (from 128GB) are double the price compared to an ordinary SATA SSD. Therefore it would be really good if I could use the, at least 128 GB big, M.2 SSD as a combination of boot drive and storage drive for jails since there will be plenty of expensive (and fast - for jails) SSD space unused otherwise.