Considering running under VMware ESXi

[ChrisNAS]

On

That's good to hear @ChrisNAS. I had a bit of a play with jails initially, but the more I read the more I thought ESXi was worth giving a go. The only downside may be the resource allocation thing, but I'm hoping it won't be an issue. If FreeNAS is doing nothing but storage + cloud backups, how many vCPUs would you give it?

My hardware has finally finished arriving today, so I've put the mobo/cpu/ram together. Got IPMI working without any trouble (except it uses java, ugh! installed in windows sandbox for now). I'm running memtest on it and no problems so far. Next step will be to do a USB FreeNAS install and read the disk burn in thread!

Edit: Just found the HTML5 link in IPMI. Bit clunky, but I'll call that a win!

I was going to mention the html5 option :)

I have FN 1 cpu and I think 8 or 16gb mem for a 4tb mirror. Works great.

Didn't read whole thread, so if mentioned, disregard. But, take a look at both bios and ipmi updates from supermicro. Some are critical some are recommended. Fairly simple and straight forward to do. Then, you'll need to flash the HBA to IT mode if it isnt already in order to pass control of the drives over to FN.

Then in esxi, first enable passthrough on the controller under Host>Manage>Hardware tab. And when you add FN vm, the controller will show up, but before the passthrough works, you have to click Add other device up top of the form and add PCI device where in my case showed SAS controller. This last bit prevented me from seeing drives in FN for a while.

If you get stuck post and if I can I'll try to help. Good luck!

 

[zeebee]

1 cpu and I think 8 or 16gb mem for a 4tb mirror. Works great.

Nice. I'm thinking 16 of my 32, I'd be very happy if I can get away with a single vCPU for FreeNAS.

take a look at both bios and ipmi updates from supermicro

Thanks, I've just updated my IPMI version. My bios appears to be up to date already, but I applied the 'license hack' in case I need to do one in the future (so weird that they block that).

you'll need to flash the HBA to IT mode if it isnt already

My 9210-8i appeared to be in IT mode already, but I thought I'd update it anyway, as the firmware seemed old.

This took me quite a while to sort out. I tried following this guide, but the link to Shell_Full.efi was stale and I couldn't find the right version (the newer versions don't work). I tried the FreeDOS route, but couldn't get my machine to boot from the stick I was using for some reason. I then discovered you could flash from the FreeNAS shell, and that worked nicely. However, I wanted to clear the firmware first so I could remove the bios, and for some reason you can't execute the clear command under FreeNAS. Eventually I found an old copy of Shell_Full.efi somewhere and was able to do the clear/flash from the EFI shell. There was much rejoicing.

I'm now following this guide and have the long smart tests going. I've also downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD as per this guide. It talks about floppy drives and looks like something from the 90's, so I'm hoping it's still the right tool for the job!?

 

[zeebee]

Then in esxi, first enable passthrough on the controller under Host>Manage>Hardware tab. And when you add FN vm, the controller will show up, but before the passthrough works, you have to click Add other device up top of the form and add PCI device where in my case showed SAS controller. This last bit prevented me from seeing drives in FN for a while.

Thanks for this info @ChrisNAS. I did a week of memtest/badblocks and some failure/recovery tests and felt comfortable that was enough to move onto the next stage. I hooked up my SSD and installed ESXi and followed your instructions (and the guide by @Stux) to get up and running. So far it seems to be working very nicely. I installed FreeNAS on a 16GB virtual disk and passed through my LSI SAS9210-8i, and now I'm running badblocks again just to make sure the HBA is working as expected.

Only issue I've run into is the new FreeNAS dashboard seems to have a problem... the memory/cpu/load graphs don't work, and there's a javascript error or two in the console.

I saw the same thing when I was initially testing under VirtualBox. The problem went away when I installed direct-to-hardware, but now it's back under ESXi. Hopefully something they fix, but if it's related to being virtualised I guess they probably don't support it.