FreeNAS 8 on VMWare 4.1 - no member disks

[smad]

Hi everyone. I did an install of FreeNAS on VmWare (I selected FreeBSD 64bit) as host, LSI Logic SAS controller. When I try to create a new Volume, in the popup window there are no member disks. What gives? How do I solve this? Thanks.

 

[ProtoSD]

Did you create any virtual disks?

Note: Virtual disks should be at least 4GB.

 

[smad]

Did you create any virtual disks?

Note: Virtual disks should be at least 4GB.

No I didn't (I presume). I created one big disk in VMWare with 250Gb. How do I add virtual disks? What's the best way to do this? Did not find anything in online docs and tutorials, might have missed it. I have seen my question posted in other places so a solution would be more than welcome. Thanks.

 

[Mike]

No I didn't (I presume). I created one big disk in VMWare with 250Gb. How do I add virtual disks? What's the best way to do this? Did not find anything in online docs and tutorials, might have missed it. I have seen my question posted in other places so a solution would be more than welcome. Thanks.

You just add a disk in the configuration of that specific virtual machine. The primary harddisk, where FreeNAS is installed, should be atleast of 2gb in size to install the latest beta so i guess 2gb is a bare minimum from now on. Then you can add your data disks that you can configure to be data disks. Some performance tips; thin provisioning is great but does come with a slight performance penalty, same with caching the changes; I would set that to persistent if you can find the option.

 

[ProtoSD]

Here's a screen capture,

click on ADD (highlighted in red),
then choose 'Hard Disk',
then 'Create New Virtual Disk',
then choose 'SCSI'
then enter '4' (maximum disk size)
click 'Store virtual disk as a single file'
give it a name like 'disk-1', or 'disk-2'
click Finish
repeat for additional drives


Note: Maximum disk size of 4GB is just for basic testing.

 

[smad]

Did that once, but did not reboot. Rebooting the server fixed the issue. Thank you.

 

[smad]

You just add a disk in the configuration of that specific virtual machine. The primary harddisk, where FreeNAS is installed, should be atleast of 2gb in size to install the latest beta so i guess 2gb is a bare minimum from now on. Then you can add your data disks that you can configure to be data disks. Some performance tips; thin provisioning is great but does come with a slight performance penalty, same with caching the changes; I would set that to persistent if you can find the option.

Thank you for the advice. Server is not final, just starting to work with FreeNAS and space is at a premium :)