can I move a existing freenas server to a windows virtualbox virtual machine

[sonisame72]

I have dedicated hardware running freenas 8.04 with bunch of harddrives configured as data discs.

The hardware resources are getting old and I want to replace or merge them with my existing htpc which has newer components. If I install virtual box on windows 7 machine, can I move my freenas server(all harddrives) into a virtual environment, or do I risk of loosing data (windows messing up with my existing data discs and formatting them to ntfs on boot)

Please advise

Thanks

 

[survive]

Hi sonisame72,

In theory I think you should be able to do this, but I would only try if you can get a copy of your data backed up to somewhere else. Personally I would call this plan "high risk" and wouldn't dream of doing it without a some sort of safety net in place!

I think the question really gets down to if you can pass the disks through directly to the VM so FreeNAS can see them like it does now. If you can then I think it might more or less work.

But really, to be blunt, why would you want to do this? If you have a PC that's running windows why not just add the disks directly to the windows box & avoid the whole VM plan completely?

If getting new hardware for your FreeNAS box is an option that's the path I would be looking at.

-Will

 

[xbmcg]

... maybe it is because there is tons of data on the disks and windows is kind of ignorant regarding reading zfs volumes

Windows in most cases asks, if you agree to convert disks, when it recognises a unknown one on the controllers - and usually only if you open the disk management console, otherwise it just ignores this disks. This allows to have multi-boot environments e.g. side-by-side windows (ntfs) and linux (ext3, ext4) partitions or whole disks.

So you should be save as long as you do not agree on "convert" or "format" proposals...

VMWare usually allows using physical disks insted of virtual disks, so this could work. Maybe you try this with a spare single disk, added first as zfs volume to your freeNAS, then exported and connected to a freeNAS virtual instance in Windows, then re-imported.

IMHO there are good chances, this will work. I am not sure, how VirtualBox behaves - but I assume it will work similary - or do you mean the virtualzation built-in in Windows? This could be more tricky, because it is performance optimized to run xp-mode for legacy apps. I am not sure, if the abstraction is sufficent to run a freeBSD side by side and give it physical ressources (disks)...

 

[sonisame72]

Thanks for comment

I am going to try on port it to freeNas running on Oracale VirtualBox for a windows7 64 bit machine. I will try it with one of my pool which is fairly empty (and I wont regret if I loose the data).

If it all goes well, I will port the whole pool. I do remember windows asking formatting of a disk drive only if I call the disk management tool, otherwise it leaves it alone.

As far as dedicated machine for freenas is concerned, I have not found a sweet spot for newer core i5/i3 processors with freenas. Having a multi-core cpu on a newer lga-1155 platform is kind of waste for the single threaded freenas.

Also the insanely low prices on ddr-3 RAM makes updating older lga-775 platform ddr-2 to 16G/32G a no go.

Sonisame