Building a FreeNAS for the first time

[ARKansans]

Hi there.
I have a server I want to install freenas on which has ESXi-6.0.0-20160302001 installed on, and running few light game servers on it.
My server specs are.
Intel® Server System P4308CP4MHEN
Intel® Server Board S2600CP4
2x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2670
Micron 32GB (4x 8GB) mt36kszf1g72pz-1g4d1dd
6x4TB Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB 64MB Cache
I'm going to install freenas on a VM, will I get into any troubles with this setup?
Anything special I have to do or is it just install and run?

 

[Nvious1]

So I am still a freenas n00b but have lots of experience with esxi. If you are going to vvirtualize freenas hardware compliance becomes less of an issue. Are the existing disks on a raid controller and presented as a single data store or they all individually provisioned? What I have seen done typically with esxi and virtualized freenas is you need to have a raid (in it mode) or hba controller passed direct up to the freenas vm so it can then manage the disks as it's intended. To keep it short, people then pass the storage back to esxi over nfs or iscsi to be a data store.

So depending on how esxi is installed and the existing storage is configured depends on what you will have to do.

Hopefully that was the kind of answer you were wanting to know.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

 

[Chris Moore]

So I am still a freenas n00b but have lots of experience with esxi.

You are giving incorrect advice because of your lack of experience. FreeNAS has been virtualized many times by forum members and we know what works and what will cause catastrophic data loss.

 

[Chris Moore]

Anything special I have to do or is it just install and run?

You still need to follow certain FreeNAS hardware guidelines if you want to be sucessful.

"Absolutely must virtualize FreeNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/

Build Report: Node 304 + X10SDV-TLN4F [ESXi/FreeNAS AIO]
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...node-304-x10sdv-tln4f-esxi-freenas-aio.57116/

Testing the benefits of SLOG
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/testing-the-benefits-of-slog-using-a-ram-disk.56561

The ZFS ZIL and SLOG Demystified
http://www.freenas.org/blog/zfs-zil-and-slog-demystified/

The best course of action for the drives is to do burn-in testing on them prior to creating a pool.
Here is a guide to that:

Building, Burn-In, and Testing your FreeNAS system
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/building-burn-in-and-testing-your-freenas-system.38/

and another:

Uncle Fester's Basic FreeNAS Configuration Guide
https://www.familybrown.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=fester:intro