Hi - gathering info for my lab/all-in-one build

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yanman

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So this build has taken quite a few different turns. Started out when I got interested in the potential of these cheap Xeon E5-2670's. My rig now:

2 x Xeon E5-2670 ( 2 x Noctua NH-12S coolers)
64GB 1600Mhz DDR3 ECC Reg
Lenovo D30 workstation board (Intel C602 chipset)
Intel 320 120GB SATA SSD
Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.2 in an M.2 to PCI-e lane converter card (board won't boot it)
Seasonic Platinum-1000 PSU
Phanteks Enthoo Pro with normal drive cages removed (to fit the board!!!)
5 x 3TB WD Greens of various models. Currently individual drives with stuff on them

My goals:
- Win10 regular desktop (VM or bare-metal) with GPU for gaming etc
- Redundant storage of some sort
- Unified Network Lab (runs as multiple VMs)
- Other Windows VMs
- Test Linux VMs
- Possibly a Kodi media-center VM that had a low-end GPU pass-through

My ideas:
- CentOS 7.x, use KVM for the VMs with passthrough for the Win10 and Kodi VMs, local ZFS or BtrFS for RAID5-ish storage
- Win10 bare metal with VM Workstation and .... ? for storage..
- ProxMox? I did briefly try it and thought it looks way too hard
- FreeNAS?

So.. the last option of FreeNAS came up just today when I saw it had KVM hypervisor support. So the big question is - can it do GPU pass-through to a VM? I see all these posts about using FreeNAS as a VM with some other hypervisor, but I couldn't understand why if FreeNAS itself can be the hypervisor.
 

Spearfoot

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So.. the last option of FreeNAS came up just today when I saw it had KVM hypervisor support. So the big question is - can it do GPU pass-through to a VM? I see all these posts about using FreeNAS as a VM with some other hypervisor, but I couldn't understand why if FreeNAS itself can be the hypervisor.
FreeNAS is not a hypervisor, but it can be virtualized.

Most people who virtualize FreeNAS use VMware ESXi as the hypervisor. VMware is the market leader in virtualization and the free version of ESXi works well. There are numerous posts on the forum regarding this subject ("My Dream System", for example). The FreeNAS VM can be set up to provide NFS or iSCSI-based data storage to the hypervisor for additional VMs.

So your question about GPU passthrough doesn't apply to FreeNAS; it applies to the hypervisor you choose and the hardware you run it on. Not all systems provide the necessary VT-d PCI device passthrough support, and note that such support is critical, as you need to pass the system's hard drive controller to the FreeNAS VM, giving it full control of the disks. Given VT-d support, you can also passthrough other devices as well, including the GPU, but without actually trying, it's difficult to say whether this will be successful for a particular combination of hypevervisor, motherboard, and GPU. A good place to start is the hardware compatibility list for your chosen hypervisor.

Another complicating factor is the exclusivity of VT-d device assignment: you can't assign the same device (hard disk controller, video adapter) to multiple virtual machines. In your example, you wouldn't be able to assign your GPU to both a Windows 10 gaming VM and another VM, too.

Your first question is: does my D30 system support VT-d passthrough? A cursory examination of the D30's specifications doesn't show that it has this capability; you'll have to dig deeper to find out.
 

yanman

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Thanks for the reply!

I was probably not clear enough - when I meant FreeNAS as a hypervisor I was talking about the OS/distro of FreeBSD that I think of as just FreeNAS since that I assume I'd be installing.. i.e. a FreeNAS installer vs FreeBSD and then loading FreeNAS.

FreeNAS 10, on FreeBSD 10, comes with the Bhyve hypervisor so yes technically it's not FreeNAS the app that is the hypervisor but from an OS perspetive I get the hypervisor on the same one as FreeNAS :)

Yep I'm fully aware of requirements for pass-through of GPUs and other devices on ESXi/Linux distros it's just that I only became aware of the Bhyve option recently. Multiple devices isn't required. If I wasn't using Win10 on the bare-metal then the box would likely just run headless with the only GPU's assigned to the relevant VM's.

The D30 board is based on the Intel workstation/server C602 chipset and fully supports VT-x and VT-d as do the CPUs (SR0KX stepping vs the SR0H ones that don't)

Hmm just noticed that USB pass through isn't supported yet on Bhyve :/ Looks like it might be a scratch.
 
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