Freenas - ESXI - Fibre - Freenas

[cmacnichol]

Hello all,

I am trying to figure out if what I want to do here is possible or not. Or even if there are any better ways to do it, always open to new ideas.

Currently my Storage is spread all over the place and my main media server is a severely under powered HP Microserver N40l with 8GB of RAM running WHS 2011.

In and attached to it are three 1.5TB and 3 1 TB Drives which are currently pooled with Drive Bender. Some of them are currently failing as well.

Through a friend I was able to get some server hardware and splurged on some new drives for myself.

Here is the List of what hardware I now have to work with.

HP N40l Microserver (8GB ECC RAM, Severely Underpowered, Running WHS 2011)
HP DL380 G7 (1 x E5620, 72gb RAM, New Server)
3 x 1TB HD's
3 x 1.5TB HD's
4 x 3TB Western Digital RED Drives (New Purchase)
2 x 4gb Qlogic 2460 Fiber HBA's
4 x 450 GB SAS Drives (Located in DL380) about 1.2TB usable Storage
4 x 73 GB SAS Drives (Unused)

I am currently thinking of loading the 4 x 3TB drives in the Microserver with a stand alone Freenas Install.
As I have need of a few other various Systems, I have loaded ESXI 5.5 on the DL380. Storage for that is currently covered by the SAS drives and I do not see that need increasing anytime soon.

My biggest storage hog is, of course, Media files. I am wondering if I can pass the Fiber HBA through to a Virtual Freenas Instance, which would use the servers more powerful specs, and treat the Disks in the Stand Alone Freenas as basically Direct Attached Storage. This would also let me use the Servers memory for Deduplication (If Needed). If I ever needed to expand this storage, I can just offer more disks to the storage pool over the fiber link.

The Freenas install in ESXI will be responsible for File Storage Media Management (Plex, Sickrage, CP...).

I found the a few good guides on this forum on how to use is as a Target for ESXI, but nothing on using it as the Initiator.

So, can a Freenas install act as both an Initiator and a Target for a Fiber link? Is this possible? Or am I heading the wrong way and should do this a different way?

 

[mav@]

FreeNAS can do both Initiator and Target over Fiber Channel, but each one FC port should be explicitly configured to either initiator or target mode, but probably not both.

 

[cmacnichol]

FreeNAS can do both Initiator and Target over Fiber Channel, but each one FC port should be explicitly configured to either initiator or target mode, but probably not both.

Any Hints on how to enable Initiator mode on one side?

Also, is the way I have this configured, will this work? And if so, Will it act like I think it will? Plan is to have the disks act as Direct Attached Storage and then create a RaidZ1 within the Virtual FreeNAS. From everything I can find it should act like they are directly attached and should not cause any performance issues.