ESX Portable Demo Lab, no UPS, clean shutdown optional

[esxtester80]

Hi All,
I've got a partial ESX Demo Lab consisting of 2 Intel NUCs, with 3.5GHz CPUs and 32 GB RAM each, and with ESX as the operating system for a 2 TB SSD in each box. I'm trying to demo things like vMotion that require shared storage, and am trying to figure out if FreeNAS is the best solution for my use case. I would likely use FreeNAS as a way to offer up the shared storage with likely NFS or maybe iSCSI.

At the moment the most logical step seems to be adding a 3rd portable small NUC-Like server to the setup to achieve shared stroage for things like vMotion failovers and such, but if I could do this without extra hardware, I'd be happy (virtualizing FreeNAS if SAFELY possible).

With some demos we are really pressed for time and I cannot always expect time for proper shut downs. Usually all VMs just get paused with snapshots and most of the time esx shuts down properly, sometimes not. I'm concerned that FreeNAS will simply corrupt itself on power loss, as seems to often be the case in various forum posts.

Some questions I have:
1. Is FreeNAS a good solution for my use case (quick demo and go, clean shutdown optional)?

2. Is there a better solution than FreeNAS for this use case or is NAS4Free or another Fork better able to handle the use case?

3. Would it make sense to try and install a battery into a tiny demo-server as a UPS? Anyone ever done that?

4. Is it possible to use FreeNAS in more of a JBOD setup so that if a disk fails I don't lose everything on the other disks? I'd rather be able to change the disk config often instead of getting better performance with RAID.

5. Are there tuning options to make FreeNAS more fault tolerant (something like only synchronous writes, and less making the disks depend on each other as RAID does)? I'd like to just basically worry about keeping backups of the data and not concerning myself with the disk RAID configs so I could add and remove disks as needed without screwing up pools or vDevs. I'd also like to occasionally swap out a 2TB SSD for a 1TB SSD or should they ever become affordable, upgrade to a 4TB SSD on one of the boxes.

6. Am I overthinking this? Can ESX be configured to somehow share a local disk with another ESX that share's it's local disk?

Thank you for your help!

 

[esxtester80]

So apparently this is what I'm trying to do:
http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1740775
Basically just let 2 ESXi Hosts access the same NFS Share.

They recommend OpenFiler and I've heard I could just install Open Filer in a VM and share out a large VMDK Disk-as-a-File in the datastore to achieve an NFS volume for all ESXi Hosts to access. Seems inefficient to me though.

Is there a way to do something like that with FreeNAS?

Should I just be sharing out the VMFS Datastore instead of trying to make NFS or iSCSI shares?

Can FreeNAS use a file system other than ZFS?

ZFS makes me nervous in terms of data loss should it not be RAID-Like configuration (just a single disk). Are these fears founded if I keep it in synchronous writing mode? Will it have a huge performance hit if I set it up like that vs. OpenFiler on EXT3?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Zfs will not lose your data from a power outage, it's specifically designed to always have a consistent view of the filesystem.

You should use mirrors and keep sync writes enabled. I would use nfs for my vms but that's because I think it's easier. You will also need a high performance slog device if you expect any kind of performance. Intel p3700 is a good starting place.

 

[Ericloewe]

I'm concerned that FreeNAS will simply corrupt itself on power loss, as seems to often be the case in various forum posts.

No it's certainly not "often" the case. It's rather rare, in fact, and minor in scope.