Dell T20 / VMWare ESxi / 10TB Ironwolf Seagate drive

[mukul v]

Hello,

I recently purchased a 10TB iron wolf seagate drive that I am planning on installing in my Dell Box. My goal is to create a FreeNAS VM (I'm running customized dell version of ESXi 6.0) and use the 10TB drive for my pool.

I've read several articles calling to disable certain features, or to use ISCSI, etc. Any thoughts or considerations I should take into account when getting this up and running?

I've got a test version up and running, however, in ESXi VM settings for FreeNAS 9.1, when I set Seagate drive to be using "ISCSI", FreeNAS bombs with an error. When i set it to SATA it works just fine. I've also read several threads of related to esxi and FreeNAS, warning to be cautious of various settings, otherwise incorrect settings could lead to complete data loss related to ZFS pools.

your help is appreciated!

 

[lukyjay]

Just to make sure I understand, are you planning to run FreeNAS with any other drives, or just the one 10tb drive?

If so, FreeNAS is not intended for this function. You would be better considering other alternatives like Open Media Vault, running a linux distro, etc.

 

[Arwen]

More than a few people here in the forums use virtualization of some sort.

However, jumping into FreeNAS by making it a virtual machine may not be the best way to use FreeNAS.
It is highly suggested you peruse the forums, sticky threads and How Tos first. ZFS is radically different,
(which is why many of us like it and it's features).

Further, FreeNAS is up to version 9.10.x, (for stable train). So 9.1 is pretty old, (several years at least).

If you are just testing FreeNAS in a VM, that's different. But, you don't need a 10TB disk to perform
testing and learn FreeNAS.

 

[wblock]

when I set Seagate drive to be using "ISCSI", FreeNAS bombs with an error.

I can't help with this, but others who can would probably be better able to help if the actual error message was known.

 

[gpsguy]

We need a lot more information than you have a T20, 10TB drive, ESXi 6.0, and FreeNAS 9.1.

Which CPU do you have in the T20? How much RAM? How much RAM have you allocated to FreeNAS in the VM? Are you using a flavor of FreeNAS 9.10 (.2?)? FN 9.1 <> FN 9.10. Do you have other HDD's or SSD's? Are you aware that ESXi 6.5 is available? How do you boot ESXi? Do you have a HBA for the 10TB drive? Are you able to set passthrough (in ESXi) for your controller.

While one can virtualize FreeNAS, I wouldn't recommend that you do it, at this juncture.

To get an idea of idea of what's needed, read about joeschmuck's adventure in this arena - https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/my-dream-system-i-think.41072/