Any long term experience with FreeNAS on type 2 hypervisor (non bare metal)?

[Abnovitas]

Good evening :)

I'm basically looking for experiences and information regarding running a FreeNAS server inside a non-bare metal virtualized machine like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox.
I googled and read a lot about this topic, but all I could find was theorycrafting or getting persuaded into not doing it. Again, no experiences regarding data loss while using it, only theory.

I've got two good performing Windows computers at home. One is my desktop, the other one is my all-purpose server/HTPC. Both PCs are running Windows 8 Pro and the server is sharing my files directly via CIFS. The server also hosts a virtualized pfSense router and a Debian installation inside VMware Workstation. My disk space is running full and I'm not using any form of RAID at the moment (except my striped boot drive in my desktop) and I'm planning to get three new disks for my server soon.
So basically I'd like to setup a FreeNAS server in VMware Workstation and give the machine raw access to the new disks and set up a RAIDZ1 volume. My server has 32 GBytes of RAM already, because RAM is cheap and I like to have as much data cached as possible, so there's plenty of it I can assign to FreeNAS.
I can't use the PC for ESXi because of its HTPC purposes and I don't want to have an extra PC running either (noise and power consumption), so a type 2 hypervisor is the only option for me. I could use a hardware RAID5, but I'd lose ZFS' benefits like snapshots, cross platform compatibility etc. Hyper-V seems like a good idea, but as long as there is no proper support for BSD, that's not an option.
Performance isn't that important, though being able to max out my 1 Gbps connection via CIFS would be nice.

Is anyone using this kind of configuration? I'd be happy to hear of some first hand experiences :)

Thanks a lot in advance :)

 

[Stephens]

FreeNAS in a Virtual Machine

 

[Abnovitas]

Yeah, exactly. No first hand experiences regarding stability/reliability of a FreeNAS instance in a type 2 hypervisor with raw disk access.

Thanks for that link...

 

[cyberjock]

I have only seen bad things happen with Windows and "unformatted" disks given to VMWare workstation. In the spirit of protecting your data, I think you are making a mistake if you do try to use VMWare Workstation or Virtualbox to give it exclusive access to the drives. I get the impression that Windows does odd things to unpartitioned disks(it shouldn't, so I don't know what its doing) and stuff has been corrupted on 2 setups like the one you are doing.

I run a virtualbox with 6GB of RAM and 800GB of disk space via vdi file(similar to vmdk) and performance fluctuates wildly. If the server is completely idle I can get about 50% of Gb speeds, but no more. In Windows using windows shares on the same partition and same drives I can get almost 90MB/sec. If the server gets busy serving files or anything else I've seen my FreeNAS VM go to less than 10MB/sec. I only recommend VMWare Workstation or Virtualbox as a test platform and not to be trusted with any real data. Not to mention that even if you give FreeNAS exclusive disk access I don't believe that SMART data is passed to the VM, so you'll get no indication from FreeNAS of any potential disk failures.

TL;DR - Don't do it. Build a new system or convert your Windows machine to strictly FreeNAS.

 

[Abnovitas]

Damn, I was afraid someone would share bad experiences like these :(

Yeah, I guess you're right. Windows does too much unintended stuff in some cases. I remember having quite some issues with whole disk encryption using Truecrypt a while back. And that was pretty high level stuff compared to a virtualized ZFS volume...

Thanks for sharing though :)

 

[joeschmuck]

I will run FreeNAS in VMWare 8 but I create virtual drives to use. You could do the same, large virtual drives and preallocate the data if you desire and them RAIDZ them. The reliability comes down not to FreeNAS but your computer and VMWare. If your computer dies and one of the virtual drives gets corrupt, hey that just sucks. Too much risk for real data but for testing, even for a few weeks, that is fine. But hey, don't have automatic updates turned on :)

 

[JaimieV]

From your description, I'm not clear why you can't use the PC under ESXi - it looks like the right solution to me (given your other constraints). What about the HTPC functionality will break under ESXi - do you have a non-virtualisable PCI(e) bus with a tuner card on it or something? If so, you might win by replacing the card with a USB one.

 

[Abnovitas]

The "server" is not using a dedicated graphics card and I don't know if an integrated HD4000 chip can be passed through to a guest. The same with its onboard sound chip.
The other reason is ESXi's disabled write cache for any disk/controller that's not backed by a BBU. So I'd expect the performance to be abysmal unless I'd pass through a dedicated controller for each machine. The PC is only using its onboard SATA controller at the moment.

I actually wanted to keep the host running on Windows 8, but I guess I will switch to Ubuntu(or Mythbuntu) running XBMC and ZFS on Linux. FreeBSD sounds tempting, but I just started learning a bit of BSD and don't feel prepared enough to make a complete switch just yet. Ubuntu (or rather Linux in general) seems to be the best solution for me at this time.