FreeNAS on VMWare

[Michael T.]

Good evening, everyone! My name is Michael and I'm working on some infrastructure upgrades to my home-office network.

I'm new to the forum and have never set up a FreeNAS server before. I am planning on running one on my network through a 10 gigabit ethernet connection, maybe even two of them. Seems simple, right? Here's the catch: I want to run it on VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESXi 6. I want to dedicate one 10GbE LAN port in my host server to the FreeNAS VM. I also don't wish to run it with vDisks--I want to use a dedicated SAS/RAID card which will also only be available to the FreeNAS VM. I am looking to be able to achieve speeds of 1 GBps (yes, one gigaBYTE per second) over the network to the FreeNAS box.

I am fairly certain that I can dedicate a NIC to a VM in VMware, but I'm not too sure about dedicating a SAS/RAID card. Can someone shed some light on this? I have never used FreeNAS or built a VMware server before.

Thanks!!

 

[Spearfoot]

Good evening, everyone! My name is Michael and I'm working on some infrastructure upgrades to my home-office network.

I'm new to the forum and have never set up a FreeNAS server before. I am planning on running one on my network through a 10 gigabit ethernet connection, maybe even two of them. Seems simple, right? Here's the catch: I want to run it on VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESXi 6. I want to dedicate one 10GbE LAN port in my host server to the FreeNAS VM. I also don't wish to run it with vDisks--I want to use a dedicated SAS/RAID card which will also only be available to the FreeNAS VM. I am looking to be able to achieve speeds of 1 GBps (yes, one gigaBYTE per second) over the network to the FreeNAS box.

I am fairly certain that I can dedicate a NIC to a VM in VMware, but I'm not too sure about dedicating a SAS/RAID card. Can someone shed some light on this? I have never used FreeNAS or built a VMware server before.

Thanks!!

Welcome to the forums!

Quite a few people build 'All-in-One' (AIO) systems such as you're describing and, yes, you absolutely can pass a HBA (Host Bus Adapter) through to the FreeNAS virtual machine. The LSI-based HBAs (LSI 9210/9211 / IBM M1015 / Dell H200/H300) are known to work very well in this case -- I have 3 such systems. ZFS works best when it has direct control of the disks, so you want to use a HBA, not a RAID card.

Another thing you'll want to do is reserve all of the FreeNAS VM's assigned memory.

Search the forum and you'll find quite a bit of information about virtualizing FreeNAS, the difference between HBA and RAID cards, etc.

This is a great off-site How-To article about building an AIO:

https://b3n.org/freenas-9-3-on-vmware-esxi-6-0-guide/

Good luck!

 

[FreeN@s!]

Hello ,

I'm running HP Microserver Gen8 / 16GB RAM / E3 1230v2 with AIO setup on ESXi 6, FreeNAS VM with 8GB RAM, IBM M1015 flashed to IT. HBA and 1 NIC is passed directly to FreeNAS VM. It is running rock stable for more than a year now.

There is also good article here about FreeNAS virtualization.

http://www.freenas.org/blog/yes-you-can-virtualize-freenas/

 

[Dice]

I'm new to the forum and have never set up a FreeNAS server before. I am planning on running one on my network through a 10 gigabit ethernet connection, maybe even two of them. Seems simple, right? Here's the catch: I want to run it on VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESXi 6. I want to dedicate one 10GbE LAN port in my host server to the FreeNAS VM. I also don't wish to run it with vDisks--I want to use a dedicated SAS/RAID card which will also only be available to the FreeNAS VM. I am looking to be able to achieve speeds of 1 GBps (yes, one gigaBYTE per second) over the network to the FreeNAS box.

I am fairly certain that I can dedicate a NIC to a VM in VMware, but I'm not too sure about dedicating a SAS/RAID card. Can someone shed some light on this? I have never used FreeNAS or built a VMware server before.

Welcome.

While your design can be achieved and functional it is far more complex than getting a bare metal machine up.
The typical course of action is to setup FreeNAS on bare metal first, preferably the same box you intend to use for AIO.
The purpose is to enable you to save a config file for FreeNAS and have something to revert to. As the newbie-bonus - this way you will for sure avoid confusion and accidentally setting up drives in <oh so common> but <oh SO dangerous> ways.
The migration part onto a virtualized platform is easy. Setup BSD x64 VM on esxi. lock RAM, passthrough HBA and selected NIC, Install FreeNAS, boot FreeNAS, upload config. done.

Setting up ESXi on a host is easy. For convenience - set static IP's.
However, you'd want to make sure FreeNAS never gets halted unexpectedly.
Think carefully about how to implement a strategy that becomes bullet proof for the host to shut off properly and ..boot up properly. Worse - handle power outages.
There is a reason the forum is diligent about users having a UPS. Because it matters.

Concluding - don't get caught up in doing it all at once. It will probably be a lot more convenient thought process if you separate into two parts.

 

[ChriZ]

I agree with @Dice
You mentioned that you have never used FreeNAS, or VMware before.
So I suggest you take it slow, get familiar with them separately at first, then attempt to combine them.
If you do decide to start with the AIO, though, make sure that you have good backups, because there is always a chance of a - catastrophic - mistake..

 

[Michael T.]

Welcome to the forums!

Quite a few people build 'All-in-One' (AIO) systems such as you're describing and, yes, you absolutely can pass a HBA (Host Bus Adapter) through to the FreeNAS virtual machine. The LSI-based HBAs (LSI 9210/9211 / IBM M1015 / Dell H200/H300) are known to work very well in this case -- I have 3 such systems. ZFS works best when it has direct control of the disks, so you want to use a HBA, not a RAID card.

Another thing you'll want to do is reserve all of the FreeNAS VM's assigned memory.

Search the forum and you'll find quite a bit of information about virtualizing FreeNAS, the difference between HBA and RAID cards, etc.

This is a great off-site How-To article about building an AIO:

https://b3n.org/freenas-9-3-on-vmware-esxi-6-0-guide/

Good luck!

Thank you! And that's a great article. I will definitely refer to it when I start this process. I'm still in the development stages of what hardware i'm going to be using for the AIO server, so this might be a little far out.

Welcome to the forums!

Quite a few people build 'All-in-One' (AIO) systems such as you're describing and, yes, you absolutely can pass a HBA (Host Bus Adapter) through to the FreeNAS virtual machine. The LSI-based HBAs (LSI 9210/9211 / IBM M1015 / Dell H200/H300) are known to work very well in this case -- I have 3 such systems. ZFS works best when it has direct control of the disks, so you want to use a HBA, not a RAID card.

Another thing you'll want to do is reserve all of the FreeNAS VM's assigned memory.

Search the forum and you'll find quite a bit of information about virtualizing FreeNAS, the difference between HBA and RAID cards, etc.

This is a great off-site How-To article about building an AIO:

https://b3n.org/freenas-9-3-on-vmware-esxi-6-0-guide/

Good luck!

Another good article. Thank you! I'll be referring to this as well once I have the box built and ready.

Hello ,

I'm running HP Microserver Gen8 / 16GB RAM / E3 1230v2 with AIO setup on ESXi 6, FreeNAS VM with 8GB RAM, IBM M1015 flashed to IT. HBA and 1 NIC is passed directly to FreeNAS VM. It is running rock stable for more than a year now.

There is also good article here about FreeNAS virtualization.

http://www.freenas.org/blog/yes-you-can-virtualize-freenas/

Very cool! How are the transfer speeds on it?

Welcome.

While your design can be achieved and functional it is far more complex than getting a bare metal machine up.
The typical course of action is to setup FreeNAS on bare metal first, preferably the same box you intend to use for AIO.
The purpose is to enable you to save a config file for FreeNAS and have something to revert to. As the newbie-bonus - this way you will for sure avoid confusion and accidentally setting up drives in <oh so common> but <oh SO dangerous> ways.
The migration part onto a virtualized platform is easy. Setup BSD x64 VM on esxi. lock RAM, passthrough HBA and selected NIC, Install FreeNAS, boot FreeNAS, upload config. done.

Setting up ESXi on a host is easy. For convenience - set static IP's.
However, you'd want to make sure FreeNAS never gets halted unexpectedly.
Think carefully about how to implement a strategy that becomes bullet proof for the host to shut off properly and ..boot up properly. Worse - handle power outages.
There is a reason the forum is diligent about users having a UPS. Because it matters.

Concluding - don't get caught up in doing it all at once. It will probably be a lot more convenient thought process if you separate into two parts.

Excellent point about doing bare metal first and then saving config!

Static IPs? I wouldn't use anything else on a server! Heck, I may even put the servers on their own VLAN.

I agree with @Dice
You mentioned that you have never used FreeNAS, or VMware before.
So I suggest you take it slow, get familiar with them separately at first, then attempt to combine them.
If you do decide to start with the AIO, though, make sure that you have good backups, because there is always a chance of a - catastrophic - mistake..

Yes, that was my plan. I wanted to voice my long term goal so i could get some input. I'll play around with it and take it step by step. I don't have a deadline for this, so however long it takes me is however long it takes. No rush at all! I want to do this correctly so I don't end up with what you mentioned--a catastrophic mistake.