FreeNAS + ESXi5.5 + HP Microserver G8

[joelmusicman]

Greetings imnoob. Since my post count is very low, I'll just introduce myself by saying that I've been trolling the site for a few months and have my mITX build up and running for about a month, configured with ECC and many of the best practices from other threads regarding scrubs, etc. I looked into the ESXi and decided against after reading Cyber's numerous threads.

Key points:
1. You said your data is very important to you. I assume this is why you're looking at FreeNAS to begin with. If you throw away ZFS, you're also throwing away most of the benefits of using FreeNAS vs. a "dumb" share from another OS. Once you do that, then the question becomes, "why virtualize at all?"
2. Hardware RAID vs FreeNAS reliability. Hardware RAID might have the edge if you don't have a UPS solution. However, you're also handcuffed to your HP hardware, and if something goes down in 4 years, you'll probably need to replace with the exact same hardware instead of using the opportunity to upgrade in the process.

It really comes down to what you're ACTUALLY trying to accomplish. If your end-goal is just to serve media to home PCs and maybe a webserver, FreeNAS plugins and jails can be configured to do all of that. Torrents and Usenet can be automated to grab TV, movies, and music, Plex can stream across the web, webservers can be configured in jails, etc. There's NO reason to virtualize in this case. Either use FreeNAS the way it was intended, or use a different OS with your hardware RAID.

 

[jgreco]

I don't think "trolling" means what you think it means. Suggest: you've been lurking.

Trolls usually don't provide nicely summarized answers like yours. Hopefully you'll do less lurking and more posting, there aren't enough good answer people to go around.

 

[joelmusicman]

You're right. Lurking, I knew that. :)

 

[imnoob]

Hi no_connection, thanks. agree with the stickiness to controller. running raid 1 should be less of an impact in my opinion. Nonetheless, will try mounting the disk to an external sata case (when i get one) and hook up to my laptop. if i could see the vmdk, then thats great.

Can you explain binary point? With regards to 8gb, what are you referring to?

Reattaching disks may or may not work depending on controller, so that may be an eventful recovery of you need to do it. Or it might work fine.
If you intend to go that route, I would urge you to test your recovery procedure to make sure it works.

There is no binary point when going below 8GB. For some usages it could work fine, for other you might loose your pool.
The point is, above 8GB things are known to work, but below things can become complicated.

 

[imnoob]

Hi joelmusicman, thanks. I hope you're not discounting freenas advantage to simply zfs. There are clearly more to that... intuitive ui, afp with time machine support, scalability, replication, nice plugins support and many other cool features! they have clearly done a great job with the software. thumbs up to freenas developers!

on hp hardware, you're clearly misinformed. there is generally a backward compatibility even though its a total new hardware+firmware. and yup you're normally tied to the hw vendor if you choose to run fancy raid config which is not my case.

read my earlier post on why i needed virtualisation.

Greetings imnoob. Since my post count is very low, I'll just introduce myself by saying that I've been trolling the site for a few months and have my mITX build up and running for about a month, configured with ECC and many of the best practices from other threads regarding scrubs, etc. I looked into the ESXi and decided against after reading Cyber's numerous threads.

Key points:
1. You said your data is very important to you. I assume this is why you're looking at FreeNAS to begin with. If you throw away ZFS, you're also throwing away most of the benefits of using FreeNAS vs. a "dumb" share from another OS. Once you do that, then the question becomes, "why virtualize at all?"
2. Hardware RAID vs FreeNAS reliability. Hardware RAID might have the edge if you don't have a UPS solution. However, you're also handcuffed to your HP hardware, and if something goes down in 4 years, you'll probably need to replace with the exact same hardware instead of using the opportunity to upgrade in the process.

It really comes down to what you're ACTUALLY trying to accomplish. If your end-goal is just to serve media to home PCs and maybe a webserver, FreeNAS plugins and jails can be configured to do all of that. Torrents and Usenet can be automated to grab TV, movies, and music, Plex can stream across the web, webservers can be configured in jails, etc. There's NO reason to virtualize in this case. Either use FreeNAS the way it was intended, or use a different OS with your hardware RAID.

 

[no_connection]

Can you explain binary point? With regards to 8gb, what are you referring to?

With binary I mean that it ether will or it won't work.

Going below 8GB isn't as clear line as that. Somethings may work while other might fail.
Certain combinations might generate errors on one system but be fine on another.
There is no common denominator what will generate errors or instability, or at least it is not fully understood.
What has shown to work is staying above 8GB. Which is why it is pressed as a requirement.
Not sure where the 4GB is taken from initially but there is a lot less data points of failure for non ZFS machines and even less within VMs.

Regarding hardware RAID. I have only experience with the HP E200i controller built in on the ML350G5 and swapping drives didn't work that well. Going from one slot to another would not bring it online, and recreating it with another volume would result in a blank drive. Didn't put much energy into it though as I didn't need that data.
I do have a drive with win7 on that is just sitting there in the server so I might try to access it via USB bridge, just to see if it will be able to read the data.