FreeNAS 8 VM on workstation running on Windows 7 zraid.

[Miniwehats]

Hello, I need some advice here. I am fairly new to freenas but have worked with a decent amount of VMs and also storage (Netapp filers). What I have at home is a server with i7 8gb RAM, 6 1.5 TB drives and a 90gig SSD. I would like to run windows 7 off the SSD and run FreeNAS off a VM in VMware Workstation or Sun alternative. What I want to know is what is best practice for this? Can I add all the local drives to the VM by adding them as virtual drives and then create the Raid-z? Will windows want to "touch" the drives once i do that and mess things up? Can I hide the drives so windows does not want to do things with them? Also if a drive goes out will Vmware tell me or Freenas specify what disk needs to be replaced? Should i scratch that setup and run ESXI off the SSD and make a win7 VM and FreeNAS vm? I use this box for torrents and other media applications....Also had a slight issue with workstation not letting me add more than like 3 TB of space to the IDE controller and I wanted to make a second controller but could not figure it out, in sun virtual box it let me create more IDE channels but I could never get FreeNAS working on it ><

Also is 8gb RAM enough for that many TB?
ESXI a must or can I do this from workstation or Sun virtual box?

Any help would be great, I looked around the forums but cannot seem to find what I am looking for.... I assume someone out there has done this...

 

[cyberjock]

I'd strongly recommend against using FreeNAS as a VM on windows 7. ESXI is a possibility. I've read about and understand ESXI but have never used it. Creating a RAID-anything for a virtual machine is kind of pointless. You'll be running a hard drive from a .vmdk. You CAN set up physical access to the hard drives you intend to dedicate to Windows 7. From reading other forums people that did that usually regretted it later. The extra layer can backfire when any other tool tries to format the disk. The problem lays in the fact that you can setup the hard drive to be access from the VM, but you could then format the hard drive from the host OS. This backfires in nasty ways because the guest OS is unaware of any data being written to the hard drive. Some tools do reads/writes to unpartitioned drives to see if an error is returned. You might not be too happy if you find your ZFS pool constantly failing for no apparent reason.

Overall, you're best bet is dedicated hardware for FreeNAS. I run my experimental FreeNAS server in a VM only because I like to do very nasty things to the VM as well as test different things on FreeNAS without using dedicated hardware. I store no useful data on it at all. If you intend to use this in a production environment or any situation where you want your data to be safe, you should seriously consider spending the money for the proper hardware.

 

[angeldodger]

Firstly I hope I'm ok replying to an old post - if you think this should be posted as a new thread then I'll do that.

Am I right to assume that the reason the original posters question wasn't a recommended solution is that he wanted to have the VM accessing the physical drive directly?

I have been having a similar dilemma, but my solution is somewhat different & I'd like to know if it's a good solution or not!

Essentially I want Windows 8 & FreeNAS running together. I prefer not to lay out for two machines. I could go the ESXi route but am concerned that compatibility issues with consumer equipment may be a problem. So...

I thought about creating a Windows 8 machine. Creating a stripe set as a media drive and a mirrored set as a backup drive. Create a FreeNAS VM with a virtual media drive that lives on the Windows 8 media drive, and a backup drive (hosting the time machine backup from my mac) living on the windows 8 backup drive.

I figure that the FreeNAS VM drives would not need to be striped or mirrored as Windows 8 would handle that bit.

So - does this configuration make sense? Or should I just bite the bullet & go for two physical machines? Hardware wise I'd like to use an i5 or i7 with a decent amount of RAM as the Windows machine will be used for Video ripping & compression work, saving my shiny iMac from wear & tear.

Any thoughts very much appreciated.

Andy