ESXi general question HBA

[John Doe]

Hi folks,

i want to play a bit around with my test environment and try my first steps with virtualization.

i found this pic below from a guy whos was already doing this with freenas.
Actually the steps for freenas are clear, i would like to get info about the logical setup for other VMs

As you can see, 4 HDDs are directly linked via HBA to the, lets call it freenas VM.
On the same machine, i would like to run a windows server in a VM as a WSUS server
This would contain just one 4tb HDD

For the freenas VM i want to use the HBA, do i need another HBA and pass it also though for the windows WSUS?

i mean, i have 8 unused sata ports on my Motherboard and perfomance does not really matter in this case.


Long story short, do i need a HBA to link it to a VM or can i just put eg. 4 HDDs on the SATA ports of my mobo and can link them to 4 different VMs? (all VMs should be isolated)

 

[Spearfoot]

I believe you're referring to @Benjamin Bryan's excellent article: "FreeNAS 9.10 on VMware ESXi 6.0 Guide"?

The point of building an All-In-One (FreeNAS VM on ESXi) server is to have the FreeNAS VM provide storage for both file sharing and as a datastore for additional virtual machines.

You need a local datastore on which you install ESXi and the FreeNAS VM. A small SSD plugged into one of the motherboard SATA ports will serve for this purpose, or you can get fancy and use mirrored SSDs (see 'my systems' below for details on how I do this).

Connect all of your disks to the HBA you've passed through to the FreeNAS VM and configure FreeNAS to provide an NFS or iSCSI datastore; this is where you create additional VMs such as the Windows WSUS server you mentioned. Ben's article (linked above) gives good instructions on how to set up both NFS and iSCSI for this purpose.

Also, I've written some scripts for use on AIO systems that you might find handy. They're available here on the forum in the Resources section: "Utility scripts for FreeNAS and VMware ESXi".

This will all make a whole lot more sense once you've set it up and played with it a little. Take it slow; study Ben's Guide; study the other AIO postings here on the forum (search is your friend!), and you'll do fine. You'll probably find yourself tearing everything down and starting over -- I did! -- so make sure you've tested the system thoroughly before you commit important data to it.

Good luck!

 

[John Doe]

Thanks for your reply, this was really helpful.

Yes I read the guide you mentioned.

 

[garym]

Don't forget why you want FreeNAS to share out its hard drive space to ESXi and any or all VMs, instead of just adding a data store drive to ESXi or another VM.
FreeNAS gives you ZFS and drive failure protection to your whole system.

 

[al1981]

I believe you're referring to @Benjamin Bryan's excellent article: "FreeNAS 9.10 on VMware ESXi 6.0 Guide"?

The point of building an All-In-One (FreeNAS VM on ESXi) server is to have the FreeNAS VM provide storage for both file sharing and as a datastore for additional virtual machines.

You need a local datastore on which you install ESXi and the FreeNAS VM. A small SSD plugged into one of the motherboard SATA ports will serve for this purpose, or you can get fancy and use mirrored SSDs (see 'my systems' below for details on how I do this).

Connect all of your disks to the HBA you've passed through to the FreeNAS VM and configure FreeNAS to provide an NFS or iSCSI datastore; this is where you create additional VMs such as the Windows WSUS server you mentioned. Ben's article (linked above) gives good instructions on how to set up both NFS and iSCSI for this purpose.

Also, I've written some scripts for use on AIO systems that you might find handy. They're available here on the forum in the Resources section: "Utility scripts for FreeNAS and VMware ESXi".

This will all make a whole lot more sense once you've set it up and played with it a little. Take it slow; study Ben's Guide; study the other AIO postings here on the forum (search is your friend!), and you'll do fine. You'll probably find yourself tearing everything down and starting over -- I did! -- so make sure you've tested the system thoroughly before you commit important data to it.

Good luck!

Hi spearfoot

I would like kindly ask you to make it a bit more clear - I am just buying HBA but I am not sure how to install ESXi to prevent failing in case its disk fails? In your description below I have seen something I need to have one more HBA to put SSD into RAID, and this SSD would host ESXi? This means two SSDs would really be in real RAID compared to disk attached to main HBA which would be ZFS? Something very similar I got on the link of Brian, but really unclear... Maybe I can attach them to the same HBA but not sure how this combination would be visible then in the passthrough mode... Thanks in advance if you will have time to help me out here.


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[Spearfoot]

To create systems like mine you will need at least two HBAs: One for the ESXi installation datastore, and another to pass through to the FreeNAS VM. See 'my systems' below for details...

For example, on my main system I use a pair of SSDs connected to a Dell H200 adapter in RAID1 (mirrors). This RAID1 array is where I installed ESXi and the FreeNAS VM as well. I then pass through 3 of the LSI 9210 HBA to the FreeNAS VM to run the 24 x drive bays in the chassis, configuring NFS/iSCSI storage provided by FreeNAS as datastore space for additional virtual machines.

Good luck!

 

[al1981]

Dear spearfoot

Many thanks for this reply, really appreciate, it looks I was correct, but since the FreeNAS and virtualization are still not the best friends today, I was really unsure...

Just one thing more - in this setup you have, did you lose some performance compared to the classic bare metal setup? Is there anything that you can say it is not working as it should ? I am asking this because “jgreco” here is claiming the VM is for sure something that will sooner or later fail (https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/page-5)

I would just like know if I buy these missing HBAs, will I still need to think what I missed or installed totally wrong?


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