freeNAS and RAID

[kambiz]

Hello everyone!

I want to setup freeNAS on a home server. The server will be running VMWare ESXi because I want to run more than one OS on the box. However, I found out that ESXi doesn't support software RAID and I need to install a RAID controller.
My question is, whether the ZFS RAID Z on freeNAS would work when running freeNAS off of ESXi and without a RAID controller?

Thank you very much!

 

[joeschmuck]

Look in the How-To Guides/Installation, first Sticky. You may find your answer and many other answers you didn't know you had questions for in there.

 

[D4nthr4x]

Hello everyone!

I want to setup freeNAS on a home server. The server will be running VMWare ESXi because I want to run more than one OS on the box. However, I found out that ESXi doesn't support software RAID and I need to install a RAID controller.
My question is, whether the ZFS RAID Z on freeNAS would work when running freeNAS off of ESXi and without a RAID controller?

Thank you very much!

If you set this up wrong you will lose all of your data. If you set it up correctly there may still be a chance but it should be greatly reduced. I recommend reading up on a lot of other posts before you attempt to set this up, a whole lot. You need a system with VT-d or else you should just forget about it. READ READ READ But you really shouldn't be running freenas virtualized unless you have a lot of experience with esxi. These are the two posts that you should read: http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...duction-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/#post58364 http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/

 

[kambiz]

If you set this up wrong you will lose all of your data. If you set it up correctly there may still be a chance but it should be greatly reduced. I recommend reading up on a lot of other posts before you attempt to set this up, a whole lot. You need a system with VT-d or else you should just forget about it. READ READ READ But you really shouldn't be running freenas virtualized unless you have a lot of experience with esxi. These are the two posts that you should read: http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...duction-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/#post58364 http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/

Thank you, D4nthr4x!
Although my server would have a six core Xeon which supports VT-d; 16GB of Registered ECC memory; an ASRock "EPC602D8A" (at first I was planning on a Supermicro MBD-X9SRA but I saw that it doesn't support ESXi), which conforms to the suggestions in "absolutely must virtualize freenas..." post, I think I have changed my mind. I really don't want to lose my data, so I'll be thinking of alternatives. Also, now that I will not virtualize freeNAS, I may go back to the supermicro board.

 

[joeschmuck]

That was a good thread to read wasn't it. It was much easier than me telling you that your data could be at risk or that many people have flopped even though it seams easy enough and should work fine. I ran ESXi for a few weeks, it ran fine but I started to realize the risks over the benefits. It can be done but it's not for everyone.

 

[D4nthr4x]

Also running VMs off of a zfs system using spinning disks is going to cause you to have poor performance. I suggest hopping on irc and discussing with people in there. You don't need much power for strictly file storage/sharing but you do need lots of iops for VMs. And most people would say you either need to get a whole lot of hdd or you need to go with SSDs. But since you said it's a home server what I would do is get a box for freenas with a g3220 from intel, some ecc ram and whatever mobo. Then put zfs on there. Then get an ssd for your esxi host box and run vms from that ssd and backup the images to freenas. Maybe try to get a hold of cyberjock in irc and see what he thinks.

If you still want to virtualize, if your system is setup correctly the risk should be fairly low, probably lower than not using ecc ram, that you would lose a pool, it might even be about the same as the risk of running on bare metal. I'm assuming you didn't buy anything yet? If that is the case definitely come talk with some of us (if we are on/active, you might have to wait until later tonight). But I spent a few weeks going over everything and talking with people before I bought anything for freenas and I would advise you to do that as well.

 

[joelmusicman]

The way I understand it (note that I've never run FreeNAS in a VM except when I was first playing with it), you want to do these steps:

1. Get an M1015 or similar RAID card that can be setup in JBOD mode (IT firmware flash).
2. Setup FreeNAS on bare metal with a real USB stick, configure your disks, etc.
3. Then and only then, install ESXi to a DIFFERENT USB stick.
4. Configure ESXi to PCI passthrough your JBOD controller to FreeNAS VM.
4. Make sure you configure ESXi to start FreeNAS before any other VMs that depend on its storage, of course...

Reason being, if something gets hosed up with ESXi, you can boot straight to the FreeNAS USB drive and still access your data.

 

[ser_rhaegar]

Also running VMs off of a zfs system using spinning disks is going to cause you to have poor performance. I suggest hopping on irc and discussing with people in there. You don't need much power for strictly file storage/sharing but you do need lots of iops for VMs.

Yes and no. That really depends on the storage load of the VMs. I'm running 14 VMs on my cluster, 12 are on my FreeNAS raidz2 pool of 6 2TB drives. No SSDs in my pool. I haven't hit a storage bottleneck yet. Aside from Splunk, my VMs are not heavy on disk usage though.

I will be moving them to a physical FreeNAS box soon, only because it is annoying having to juggle their storage location around when I reboot hosts. When I do this I plan on using mirrors instead as I will be hitting 30+ VMs in a couple weeks.

Note: I'm using iscsi, single gigabit link, no sync.