FREENAS setup, scared or to be proud?

[ebeng]

As a newby to FREENAS, I would like to ask how good the following setup is:

- ESXi server (Dell T440)
-1x 400Gb SAS disk, running ESXi on it, with 1/2 critical VM's
-4x 6TB in RAID5, this is given to ESXi as a datastore, from iDrac

Freenas is installed as an VM with 20GB and 10TB, both on the RAID5 disk.

I've read a couple of time: "i've lost my data due to ESXi" etc....

I'm a bit scared to start all my data transfer from multiple disks to FREENAS, as i'm not sure yet if this is the way forward(afraid to lose all the data). Or am i good to go?

I want to expand the RAID5 with time, with more disks and after this, i would like to resize the 10TB, which is used for the SMB share.
This resizing of the disk is proven to work with the script described here: https://github.com/sblanchet/freenas-vdisk-expand

 

[sretalla]

What you're doing is not good for FreeNAS.

Allocating a virtual HDD from another OS RAID is exactly what not to do for FreeNAS.

FreeNAS needs direct access to the physical disks and controller if it is going to work properly.

 

[Chris Moore]

One of the long-time contributors here, @jgreco has made many posts regarding ways to virtualize FreeNAS.
This link is one and has links to some others of those posts. I would highly recommend that you do a lot of reading before because FreeNAS uses ZFS for storage and ZFS is not a 'plain' file system.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...nas-in-production-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/

 

[jgreco]

As a newby to FREENAS, I would like to ask how good the following setup is:

- ESXi server (Dell T440)
-1x 400Gb SAS disk, running ESXi on it, with 1/2 critical VM's
-4x 6TB in RAID5, this is given to ESXi as a datastore, from iDrac

Freenas is installed as an VM with 20GB and 10TB, both on the RAID5 disk.

I've read a couple of time: "i've lost my data due to ESXi" etc....

I'm a bit scared to start all my data transfer from multiple disks to FREENAS, as i'm not sure yet if this is the way forward(afraid to lose all the data). Or am i good to go?

I want to expand the RAID5 with time, with more disks and after this, i would like to resize the 10TB, which is used for the SMB share.
This resizing of the disk is proven to work with the script described here: https://github.com/sblanchet/freenas-vdisk-expand

It seems for the second time today I'm explaining that if you cram a hardware RAID controller in between ZFS and the disks, you critically hobble ZFS's ability to manage storage and rebuild corrupted data from redundancy.

Plus the resizing of disk is NOT "proven to work"; it might happen to work, but it's more than a bit dodgy and your data might vanish in a flash if you do the wrong things.

24TB in RAID5, though... wow... you're far braver than I.

 

[l@e]

First thing for any kind of system that is important you should not trust with single point of failure. So better go with raid6 or 10 if you need iops. And makes no point having only one disk sas for hosting VM. If you know better raid controllers and are familiar with those, just build a stable array and will be more safe than using zfs on top of raid. Just use any other system to share that smb. As @jgreco and @Chris Moore noted is not the properway to go. Please refer to those guides and also just see around in the forum discussions about that. The best you can do for start is reading how zfs works, understand it and then decide which way you go.

The best tool is the one you know how to use better. So if you are experienced with hw raid go on that path, if you like to use zfs i strongly sugest learn about it before. And im not pushing you back from zfs and FN, and i hope you go to the for the second way. It will need more time but it will pay you back over the years.

 

[ebeng]

Thank you all for your replies, I will dive in the next few days into the RAID setup, ZFS and PCI-Passthrough etc.

Just only curious why 24TB with RAID5 is brave thing to do?

 

[l@e]

It is better to not relay one drive only as ft. This is same for hwraid and zfs. More big the volume is more time will need to rebuild/resilver and there is higher probability risk that during that proces if another one fails, you loose the entire pool.

 

[ebeng]

So a RAID-6 should be better to use?

 

[jgreco]

Just only curious why 24TB with RAID5 is brave thing to do?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/

So a RAID-6 should be better to use?

Not really. ZFS is better to use, because unlike a hardware RAID controller, it can reliably tell when the data's been corrupted. However, this means you need ZFS to have control of the disks, or at least have redundancy available.