FreeNAS VM running on PC-BSD

[NCardwell]

I am considering a somewhat unconventional FreeNAS setup and would like to hear your thoughts and input.

I am looking to build a NAS/Game server. It will be a quad-core Xeon, 16GB ECC RAM, 64GB SSD and 5 1TB hard drives. I would install PC-BSD to the SSD using ZFS and configure the 5 1TB drives in a separate RAID-Z array.

Using VirtualBox I would then create a small virtual boot drive residing on the SSD to install FreeNAS. As well as 3 separate 1TB virtual drives residing on the RAID-Z array.

My question is, could I use these 3 virtual drives in FreeNAS without any parity as they already reside on a RAID-Z array within PC-BSD? Basically JBOD. I'd probably use UFS within FreeNAS as everything is already ZFS on the host.

And, could I later add more virtual drives to the same JBOD volume within FreeNAS?

Down the road I plan to upgrade the 1TB drives to 2TB drives and expand the RAID-Z volume. This would allow me to create more 1TB virtual drives that I could assign to FreeNAS.

Would love to hear some thoughts on this idea.

 

[survive]

Hi NCardwell,

At first glance I don't see why it wouldn't work, but it seems to me you are simply adding complexity....

Why not just run it all on a straight PC-BSD box?

You're already paying the "tax" of having a box with a full-on OS....why not just use that?

-Willl

 

[NCardwell]

Thank you for the reply Will,

For two reasons mainly. I really like the web interface and account control features of FreeNAS and figure this would be a good way to manage and divide disk space on the PC-BSD host as it will be hosting other VMs as well. Secondly, this NAS would be web facing so putting it in a VM would provide some isolation from other systems on my network and allow me to set up firewall and bandwidth limitations to it's dedicated IP.

So, can you create a JBOD within FreeNAS and later add disks to it? I would like to create and grow one large volume within the FreeNAS VM.

 

[cyberjock]

So, can you create a JBOD within FreeNAS and later add disks to it? I would like to create and grow one large volume within the FreeNAS VM.

Read my guide(link in the sig). It'll answer this question for you. :)

 

[NCardwell]

I played around with FreeNAS in VirtualBox today and discovered that I can do what I need to do. I have to use ZFS instead of UFS but basically I just set up a stripe and expand the volume one virtual drive at a time. It works quite easily actually. Now I just have to study up on PC-BSD to get the SSD and RAID-Z array set up properly. Still working on that side of things. I thought the graphical installer would make this easy but I guess not. I can install to the SSD just fine but can't figure out how to create the RAID-Z array during the install or even after for that matter.