SOLVED FreeNAS + Virtualbox?

[spierce7]

Earlier this year I was looking into building a FreeNAS machine, and then I discovered how much I'd be paying for the server. I also discovered PCI-E passthrough and so I decided to upgrade a few of the specs, and make a virtualized windows gaming machine to live alongside my virtualized FreeNAS. Long story short, I've setup the windows VM, and there are some unexpected quirks that make the experience annoying, so I'll be changing some stuff around.

I have 2 choices as I see it:
1. Install Windows as the primary OS, and then run FreeNAS as a VM
2. Build / buy a separate smaller machine (~$500) and setup FreeNAS on that.

My Machine:
CPU: E5-1650 v3
Memory: 64 GB
HD1: 500 GB SSD
HD2: 9 TB WD Red

My plan is to take the 9 TB HD, back-up all my family photos and videos on it, and setup crash plan pro as its backup. I don't need instant recovery or anything like that. If my hard drive goes bad, a week or 2 of my server being down isn't the end of the world. I just want to be able to guarantee I won't lose my data.

I'd like to stick with option 1 and virtualize FreeNAS (as my machine is plenty powerful, and I'd like to save the money). I found this post on virtualizing FreeNAS, and honestly it scares me a little. I'm comfortable doing things I have little knowledge of with computers (i.e. setting up pci-e passthrough), but I'm nervous about setting up the things they are talking about in that post as I have no knowledge of them, and setting them up improperly can mean data loss. It's also possible that these are all very easy configurations in the FreeNAS settings that I don't know about. How difficult will it be to get FreeNAS configured properly as a VM?

VirtualBox is probably what I'd use to virtualize FreeNAS on Windows (if there's something better you can recommend, I'll use it). How difficult will it be to get a proper setup running? Is there maybe a good guide that steps me through it?

Any advice is welcome!

 

[pirateghost]

If you think virtual box is an acceptable hypervisor to put your valuable data on, then you should go back and read those virtualization posts.

Virtual box running on Windows is a HORRIBLE idea for virtualizing FreeNAS.

You don't need FreeNAS.

Just use your windows desktop, create a share for your big hard drive so that other computers on your network can see it, and install the applications you want. There is nothing in your post that indicates FreeNAS would benefit you in ANY way. You are trying to over complicate something that is really easy.

If you don't want zfs, and snapshots provided by FreeNAS, you only have a single data disk, and you don't have appropriate hardware for a bare metal install, you don't need FreeNAS.

 

[Spearfoot]

Earlier this year I was looking into building a FreeNAS machine, and then I discovered how much I'd be paying for the server. I also discovered PCI-E passthrough and so I decided to upgrade a few of the specs, and make a virtualized windows gaming machine to live alongside my virtualized FreeNAS. Long story short, I've setup the windows VM, and there are some unexpected quirks that make the experience annoying, so I'll be changing some stuff around.

I have 2 choices as I see it:
1. Install Windows as the primary OS, and then run FreeNAS as a VM
2. Build / buy a separate smaller machine (~$500) and setup FreeNAS on that.

My Machine:
CPU: E5-1650 v3
Memory: 64 GB
HD1: 500 GB SSD
HD2: 9 TB WD Red

My plan is to take the 9 TB HD, back-up all my family photos and videos on it, and setup crash plan pro as its backup. I don't need instant recovery or anything like that. If my hard drive goes bad, a week or 2 of my server being down isn't the end of the world. I just want to be able to guarantee I won't lose my data.

I'd like to stick with option 1 and virtualize FreeNAS (as my machine is plenty powerful, and I'd like to save the money). I found this post on virtualizing FreeNAS, and honestly it scares me a little. I'm comfortable doing things I have little knowledge of with computers (i.e. setting up pci-e passthrough), but I'm nervous about setting up the things they are talking about in that post as I have no knowledge of them, and setting them up improperly can mean data loss. It's also possible that these are all very easy configurations in the FreeNAS settings that I don't know about. How difficult will it be to get FreeNAS configured properly as a VM?

VirtualBox is probably what I'd use to virtualize FreeNAS on Windows (if there's something better you can recommend, I'll use it). How difficult will it be to get a proper setup running? Is there maybe a good guide that steps me through it?

Any advice is welcome!

FreeNAS is server-oriented software and one of the main reasons for using it is the data redundancy gained by using multiple disks in either mirrors (RAID1) or parity RAID configurations (RAID-Z1, RAID-Z2, RAID-Z3). You don't seem to be familiar with this concept, as you're contemplating a single-disk system. Granted you can do this - create a single-disk FreeNAS pool. But it's rarely done as it's not redundant, which, again defeats the whole purpose of using FreeNAS.

Also, while you can indeed virtualize FreeNAS, I've never heard of anyone using VirtualBox on Windows to do so, and I wasn't aware that it's possible to pass disk controllers through to VirtualBox-based VMs. FreeNAS really needs direct access to its data disks via the disk controller, so this is very important. Most users who virtualize FreeNAS use VMware's ESXi.

In general, we don't recommend you attempt to virtualize FreeNAS unless you know what you're doing, and it sounds as though you'd be better off just running Windows.

Ah, ha! I see that @pirateghost is a faster typist than I!

In any case... good luck!

 

[spierce7]

Thanks for your responses guys. I see your point. I was originally planning on going with a RAID 5 setup, and then decided I was over-complicating things, and went with a giant single drive instead. There are still some useful features FreeNAS offers like setting up time machine compatible backup partitions, but I suppose I might be able to find other solutions for that.

Thanks guys. I imagine you've saved me a ton of headache!