FreeNAS on ESXi - Question about boot disk

[theprez]

Hey All -

I've had FreeNAS running on bare metal now for a few years with no problems at all. I'm using a SuperMicro board, 32 GB of ECC RAM and 8 hard drives connected directly to the motherboard. All's been fine for years.

Now...I've decided I'd like to reconfigure the box to run both FreeNAS and another operating system or two and plan to use VMWare 6.5 to perform that task.

From what I've read so far (and if i'm wrong please correct) the only "approved" way to go about this is to passthrough the SATA controller directly to FreeNAS so it has direct control of the disks.

So to accomplish that, I have a LSI Logic board (LSI 9211-8I) coming in the mail later this week and will connect all 8 drives to it...and setup passthrough. That should be that....FreeNAS won't know the difference.

Question I have (assuming what I said above is correct) is what to do with the FreeNAS boot disk? I'd prefer not to waste an entire disk just for that. Does the boot disk also need to be passed through or can it live in VMWare in the data store (on separate hard drives connected via the mother board SATA controller without issue)?

Thanks!

 

[melloa]

Question I have (assuming what I said above is correct) is what to do with the FreeNAS boot disk?

As you are using your disks on the HBA, in pass through, to be imported by FreeNAS after the configuration, I'd have another one (I use SSDs to be faster), as esx(i) boot and datastore, connected to the motherboard ports that you will free-up, for esx(i) boot, VMs, etc. Your FreeNAS VM would also reside there.

 

[Spearfoot]

Question I have (assuming what I said above is correct) is what to do with the FreeNAS boot disk? I'd prefer not to waste an entire disk just for that. Does the boot disk also need to be passed through or can it live in VMWare in the data store (on separate hard drives connected via the mother board SATA controller without issue)?

Thanks!

You still need a boot disk, where you will install ESXi and the FreeNAS virtual machine. This can't be a USB stick, either, as ESXi won't let you use a USB stick as a local datastore.

EDIT: To be clear: the easiest solution is to install ESXi (and the FreeNAS VM) on a SSD plugged in to one of the SATA ports on your motherboard. You don't need or want to pass this disk through to the FreeNAS VM.