Hi all, I'm looking for suggestions on the best way to migrate a FreeNAS system to new hardware. I currently have a FreeNAS system setup on desktop hardware (FreeNAS installed on 16GB USB stick, SSD for SLOG, 4 HDD's in RAIDZ2), it's functioning as shared NFS storage for a vSphere lab I have and it works really well. I want to migrate it to an IBM System x3630 M4 server with way better hardware (FreeNAS installed on another 16GB USB stick or I may put it on two mirrored drives, SSD for SLOG, maybe two mirrored SSD's, 10 NIC's that I'll be using to setup LAGG's to two switches, and 6 HDD's which are bigger in size than the 4 drives in my original system) which will also function as the new shared NFS storage for my vSphere lab.
So the storage on the original system has VM's stored on it for my VMware lab and I've thought about just copying all of them off to external hard drives, building out a new FreeNAS system on the new server hardware that's basically configured with identical volumes and shares, and then copy the VM's onto the new system. The ESXi hosts should be none the wiser that the shared storage is on different hardware, at worst I'll just need to re-add the VM's in the inventory once the hosts are connected to the new FreeNAS system. Is this a good approach? Are there other ways to approach this that are better or easier?
I know FreeNAS can do replication but I've never used it, would this be the better way to do this? Does replication only replicate the storage data or does it also replicate the FreeNAS OS and configuration to the other system also? Interested to see what you all recommend, thanks!
So the storage on the original system has VM's stored on it for my VMware lab and I've thought about just copying all of them off to external hard drives, building out a new FreeNAS system on the new server hardware that's basically configured with identical volumes and shares, and then copy the VM's onto the new system. The ESXi hosts should be none the wiser that the shared storage is on different hardware, at worst I'll just need to re-add the VM's in the inventory once the hosts are connected to the new FreeNAS system. Is this a good approach? Are there other ways to approach this that are better or easier?
I know FreeNAS can do replication but I've never used it, would this be the better way to do this? Does replication only replicate the storage data or does it also replicate the FreeNAS OS and configuration to the other system also? Interested to see what you all recommend, thanks!