Hi,
I know this has been asked a few times but I really just wanted to clarify my situation before I go ahead with it.
My goal - move my BSD jails into Docker containers with direct GPU access (yes, Plex and Tdarr the later which doesn't seem to support BSD).
The pitfall - bhyve doesn't support GPU pass thru, so the Docker containers running inside a Ubuntu 20.04 VM cannot get access to the GPU for hardware transcoding.
The solution (?) - change the bare metal OS from FreeNAS to ESXi. Run FreeNAS in a VM with pass thru/HBA for direct access to my drives. Run Ubuntu in a separate VM for Docker containers, that will have GPU direct access - leaving FreeNAS to do what it does best; being a NAS.
I don't have a heap of experience with ESXi, but I do have some experience via work (Cisco UC) - so, I'm familiar but no expert. Also, my storage consists of 5 x 2TB HDDs in RAIDZ1 that are 92% full. Boot drive is M2 SSD. My server is just for home use.
Here are my questions and concerns;
- Confirm that I can pass thru the HDD's to FreeNAS VM and re-import existing ZFS pools? (Ideally, if I could just restore a backup even better).
- Can I use the M2 SSD as both ESXi boot device and datastore for VMs? Or, am I better off booting ESXi off a USB stick and dedicating the SSD to datastore? (I don't want to do anything crazy or time consuming to use the SSD as both ESXi boot and datastore - this needs to be supportable by future me).
- Anyone know of gotcha's that might catch me out with i3-10100 processor for GPU pass thru in ESXi? Processor support IOMMU, VT-x and VT-d. It should be fine from what I've read but if anyone else has wisdom here I would be very appreciative.
Thanks in advance!
I know this has been asked a few times but I really just wanted to clarify my situation before I go ahead with it.
My goal - move my BSD jails into Docker containers with direct GPU access (yes, Plex and Tdarr the later which doesn't seem to support BSD).
The pitfall - bhyve doesn't support GPU pass thru, so the Docker containers running inside a Ubuntu 20.04 VM cannot get access to the GPU for hardware transcoding.
The solution (?) - change the bare metal OS from FreeNAS to ESXi. Run FreeNAS in a VM with pass thru/HBA for direct access to my drives. Run Ubuntu in a separate VM for Docker containers, that will have GPU direct access - leaving FreeNAS to do what it does best; being a NAS.
I don't have a heap of experience with ESXi, but I do have some experience via work (Cisco UC) - so, I'm familiar but no expert. Also, my storage consists of 5 x 2TB HDDs in RAIDZ1 that are 92% full. Boot drive is M2 SSD. My server is just for home use.
Here are my questions and concerns;
- Confirm that I can pass thru the HDD's to FreeNAS VM and re-import existing ZFS pools? (Ideally, if I could just restore a backup even better).
- Can I use the M2 SSD as both ESXi boot device and datastore for VMs? Or, am I better off booting ESXi off a USB stick and dedicating the SSD to datastore? (I don't want to do anything crazy or time consuming to use the SSD as both ESXi boot and datastore - this needs to be supportable by future me).
- Anyone know of gotcha's that might catch me out with i3-10100 processor for GPU pass thru in ESXi? Processor support IOMMU, VT-x and VT-d. It should be fine from what I've read but if anyone else has wisdom here I would be very appreciative.
Thanks in advance!