FreeNAS Virtualized on Proxmox

Joined
Apr 29, 2020
Messages
2
K_switch, thanks for your prompt response... :)

The reason I asked is I still want to use my server with linux containers, so Proxmox is perfect for it.
Just purchased old supermicro server Supermicro CSE-826 X9DRi-LN4F+ for very reasonable price and my configuration looks like this:

Supermicro CSE-826 chassis
X9DRi-LN4F+ Motherboard
2 x Intel Xeon E5-4640 SR0QT 8C CPU
128 GB RAM
LSI SAS9300-8i 9300-8i 12G SAS3 S-ATA HBA (8x 8TB SATA HDD, 4x 240GB SSD connected to it)
Proxmox boots from seperate PCIe card (2x SSD M.2 120GB disks - zfs mirror)
4x 1GbE NICs - bonded in proxmox - my LAN
1x dual port 10GbE SFP+ NIC - bonded in proxmox - my dedicated SAN
Proxmox 6.1-8, FreeNAS-11.3-U2.1

What I want to achieve is to have proxmox run as a host (hypervisor), so that I can still use my server resources for linux containers and other VMs if needed, and run FreeNAS as a VM for my very reliable small office and home storage. I very much like zfs and all of its features like compression and deduplication.
My FreeNAS VM configuration (64GB RAM, 8x 8TB SATA HDD - RAIDz2 with 1x SSD for cache and 1x SSD for log, which gives my aprox 40TB RAW space)
I have already tested couple of different configurations. When I did pass-through my entire LSI controller with all the disks attached to it directly to FreeNAS, had some problems with FreeNAS drivers for this type of LSI controller. Decided to pass-through selected drives to FreeNAS VM (see attached file). This way everything works fine, FreeNAS sees all drives perfectly, and I think I'm more flexible in case I want to migrate my FreeNAS VM to a different bare metal server in the future. Do you think with such configuration, I can still have problems you mentioned by jgreco? Or I'm ok?

I went through a lot of docs so far, and I know that running FreeNAS on bare metal is the best way to go, but then I loose my entire server only for this function.
On the other hand, I want to make sure that with my current configuration (see files attached) I'm on the safe side with my data on FreeNAS pool, datasets etc., and I won't get into trouble with proxmox interfere in any way with access to hard drives freeNAS has attached.

Let me know what do you think? Any changes you might do to my config?

So far it works good for me for couple of days.
 

Attachments

  • pvesm_freenas_hardware.png
    pvesm_freenas_hardware.png
    109.9 KB · Views: 550
  • pvesm_system_disks.png
    pvesm_system_disks.png
    84.4 KB · Views: 539
  • pvesm_system_network.png
    pvesm_system_network.png
    56.3 KB · Views: 487

K_switch

Dabbler
Joined
Dec 18, 2019
Messages
44
@KasprowiczM17

I really wish that i had an answer for you... All your Proxmox configs look standard for disk passthrough... the only issue i see is that even through in theory you are "cutting" out proxmox to these drives they are still being managed by the hypervisor and the FreeNAS VM will not have direct access to them in a raw format. I am interested in the outcome of this but i would imagine that it will work properly for quite some time until it doesnt... One test you could try is to write fake data to this pool... export the pool... and try to import on either a new VM (not recommended) or a physical FreeNAS host. I would imagine that would tell you the level of control that FreeNAS had over the raw disk.

*I MUST MAKE THIS CLEAR... I AM LEARNING AS I WOULD IMAGINE MOST OF THE COMMUNITY IS please take my comments at face value.*

Thanks
 
Top