Can FreeNAS be a Virtual Host?

[kazooless]

I was just introduced to FreeNAS today because of an article written about an Apple employee that quit and has gone back to running FreeBSD projects. I am extremely intrigued. Currently, I run an Ubuntu server with SickBeard, CouchPotato and SabNZBd. But, I also run a Linux Zimbra mail server. I have been planning to virtualize the mail server and running it as a virtual machine on the Linux media server.

Al the searching I've done only finds articles about how FreeNAS should not be run as a virtual guest itself. But, I have found nothing telling me if there is a plug-in that can run something like Virtualbox so that I could host the Zimbra server on the same machine running FreeNAS, let alone instructions.

Can somebody please speak to this?

 

[pirateghost]

Nope. It does not host VM

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus

 

[kazooless]

Bummer.

Is there a mail server alternative that could replace Zimbra? (That would run as a plugin)

 

[phoenix]

Bummer.

Is there a mail server alternative that could replace Zimbra? (That would run as a plugin)

Why don't you virtualize all your servers on an ESXi host, I run FreeNAS, Zimbra and five other servers on mine. You would need to consider your requirements carefully and read some of the forum posts (and stickies, warnings) on the subject but I have no problems with my servers(s).

 

[jkh]

I was just introduced to FreeNAS today because of an article written about an Apple employee that quit and has gone back to running FreeBSD projects. I am extremely intrigued.

Glad to hear we intrigued you. Hi. :)

Al the searching I've done only finds articles about how FreeNAS should not be run as a virtual guest itself. But, I have found nothing telling me if there is a plug-in that can run something like Virtualbox so that I could host the Zimbra server on the same machine running FreeNAS, let alone instructions.

So, is there a plugin for this? No - no one has yet created one, though it would certainly be technically possible; one of the goals of putting plugins external to FreeNAS is for people to be able to create whatever sorts of plugins there are demand for, no matter how wacky. :)

Could you install VirtualBox on a FreeNAS host yourself, manually, and host other OSes on it? Sure. There is a VirtualBox port for FreeBSD (https://wiki.freebsd.org/VirtualBox).

I think you may be fundamentally going in the wrong direction with virtualization, however. For one thing, if you just want to put another "server process" in its own privilege domain and firewall it from other processes, that's what Jails are for - there is a setup already for that. Second, if you're really after the advantages of virtualization then the right thing to do is install the virtualization software on the base hardware and then install FreeNAS / OtherOS on top of that. Even better, install FreeNAS on a completely different box and then use it as the data store for your VMs running on their own host.

 

[jkh]

Bummer.

Well, don't just trust the first response you get - there are actually various options here. :)

Is there a mail server alternative that could replace Zimbra? (That would run as a plugin)

Before you try to replace Zimbra, why not try to host it? There are at least 2 options here, not counting the "run it as a VM on another box" one that I and others have already suggested.

• See if you can run the Linux version in a Linux jail. There isn't a Linux jail as a canned jail type in FreeNAS yet, but there are recipes for creating them on the net and you can just start with a "standard jail" and morph it into a Linux one by adding the right bits to it.
• Ask the Zimbra folks for a FreeBSD port of their software, then you can run it in a standard FreeBSD jail. ;)

 

[kazooless]

Wow, I didn't think I'd be getting a response from the Apple employee I read about! Nice. :D Thanks Jordan.

All of these are good ideas and would work. I run both of these servers, media and mail, here at home. My goal is to consolidate into 1 very small energy efficient box. I don't need tons of power but I do need throughput for the media server. I've been running these two "services" in various ways over the years but hadn't lo0ked into FreeNAS before yesterday. My thoughts were just that if it already had a plug and play type of virtualization in addition to the other plugins that this would be a great way to go "for me."

I've run both services on the same Linux install in the past, but I didn't like the interference that sometimes I'd have to deal with if one had a problem. Then I setup ESXi on a desktop machine and ran both as guests. The IO on one disk with ESXi is not sufficient for the media server since I am not running a hardware RAID and don't want to tweak the settings to the unsafe and unsupported configuration to up the IO for a single SATA disk. So, I built a small but pretty powerful mini-ITX box that is capable of virtualization and installed Ubuntu onto it so it can be my media server. The plan was/is to move the mail VM which runs fine on the ESXi server to this Linux box. I just haven't quite done it yet. This would meet my needs fine I think, but I really like the interface of FreeNAS and that is why I figured I'd inquire.

As an aside, I find it interesting that there are big warning write-ups about running FreeNAS as a guest, but it has been suggested anyway. I usually am not one to run things outside of recommended practices. I find I have a lot less headaches to deal with when I operate that way.

Thanks so much for the great replies! Seems like a great community. :D

 

[pbucher]

As an aside, I find it interesting that there are big warning write-ups about running FreeNAS as a guest, but it has been suggested anyway. I usually am not one to run things outside of recommended practices. I find I have a lot less headaches to deal with when I operate that way.

FreeNAS works just fine as a guest under ESXi. In fact the recently released 9.1 works right out of the box now. That said you shouldn't just go create a VM and install it without spending sometime researching it. What is safe vs unsafe depends a lot on what you are doing with it, how you back things up, etc. There is really no one size fits all recipe for this stuff. Let me just say I've been running 5 VMs with FreeNAS in them for over a year now with zero data loss. Some of them are production SANs for companies that store several TBs of data on them and run mission critical databases on them(ok you can call me crazy but hey I didn't have the 200k to 300k for a EMC/NetApp/etc SAN that would give me the performance I need).

In very brief summary FreeNAS will run fine in a VM when given the proper resources(aka several GB of ram) and you need to structure you disks in a way that meets you needs for up time and disaster recovery. In other words there is nothing wrong with stripping a ZFS pool across some cheap consumer multi-TB drives you got at best buy for $49 on sale if you are just storing some random data that you can recover without too much pain when the pool goes south.