Can FreeNAS double up as a VMware workstation?

[koifish59]

I'm looking to build a FreeNAS for the purpose of a file sever and backups. However I'd also like for the physical computer to also host a handful of VMs with VMware workstation.

Yes, I did read the sticky that it's not good to use FreeNAS as a VM, which I don't intend to, but I'd like to somehow install VMware Workstation to also share with the hardware. Is this possible? Here is my choice of hardware:

10x 6TB WD Red WD60EFRX - Hard Drives
1x 1TB Samsung 850 EVO - SSD
ASRock E3C224D4I-14S - motherboard
Inte Xeon E3-1246 v3 3.5ghz - CPU
64gb ddr3 ECC Kingston KVR16R11D4K4/64 - memory
400 watts SeaSonic SS-400FL2 - PSU
Lian Li PC-Q26A - case

 

[koifish59]

Basically FreeNAS run on the actual hardware (acting sort of like a OS), but I also need to run Windows to install VMware to hold all my VMs, and I can't think of a way to run both FreeNAS and Windows simultaneously. Virtualizing FreeNAS would be my very last resort.

 

[danb35]

Does it have to be VMWare? FreeNAS supports adding a jail for VirtualBox, which is a hypervisor similar to VMWare, is free, and seems to work pretty well. I'm not sure how easy or difficult it would be to migrate an existing VM from VMWare to VirtualBox, though.

 

[pirateghost]

You can't install VMware workstation because there is no GUI...

 

[mjws00]

You can run virtual box with FreeNAS as the host and live with the performance and hassle.

Run Linux. ZFS on Linux. VMware workstation. It isn't hard to get tools to generally match FN functionality. You just don't get the whole integration.

Run esxi. Pass through the onboard LSI controller with vt-d ala jgrecos threads.

PS. Xeon E3's only support 32GB RAM.

 

[SirMaster]

Since FreeNAS is a terrible hypervisor (it's simply not meant to be one). I recommend using Linux for this task. You can run ZFS on Linux natively on the host for your storage pools and then you can use KVM as the hypervisor which is built into the kernel, or you can install VMware Workstation if you really want on the Linux box to run all your VMs.