Freenas ESXi free and Oracle RAC

[cptkirkh]

I am newbie to FreeNAS so don't beat me up too much for my questions. I am an Oracle DBA and want to do some testing on my home ESXi lab. It's not much just a Dell t3500. I want to run FreeNAS on a VM and create either an NFS or a ZFS mount to be able to create asm disks to share for oracle rac to run and do some testing. I have a 1TB internal drive that is not being used by the ESXi box to use for the storage. Can someone lead me down the right path? Am i crazy to try this? Can ZFS be set up with one direct attached drive? Is it better to just have FreeNAS use the one single drive as NFS? Thanks in advance.

 

[artlessknave]

this post has a number of things that are not correct. zfs is a filesystem and nfs is a network protocol. there is no such thing as "either an NFS or a ZFS mount "; you mount zfs filesystem and then export that filesystem as an nfs share.
when virtualized the only way to give freenas a drive directly is if passthrough using pci (hugely recommended), otherwise you give freenas a virtual disk from datastore like any other VM. virtual disk + freenas for anything but test is a bad idea, but for testing go nuts, though your performance with a DB is likely to be not very good.

 

[cptkirkh]

Thanks for the correction. It has been too long since I dealt with file systems. I take it that I have a little reading to do on it. I will give the passthrough pci a reading and will try to go that way. Thanks for your help.

 

[artlessknave]

you can find a ton of reading at the link in my sig, particularly good and bad ways of virtualizing freenas, and how zfs works.