How to handle disk on my hardware running ESXi?

[iceman2210]

Fairly new to FreeNas, so I will try and make this short.

I have a Dell PE 2950 and MD 1000 disk array with 15 - 300GB drives. I'm currently running ESXi 5 with a FreeNas VM. The perc 5e controller doesn't support pass through SCSI in ESXi so I'm stuck doing something creative.

My question is should I slice up the drives using the perc controller, and do a couple raid 5 volumes in order to add into ESXi as datastores then add disk into Freenas as seperate volumes to do raid-z (better protection?), or should I just create a bunch of raid 0 volumes for each disk in the perc controller and then let Freenas manage each VMDK disk?

Please note that I can't do pass through so each disk that I'm assigning to FreeNas VM would be VMDK disk from a datastore. I was reading something online about doing RDM's inside of ESXi for each volume that I would create in raid 0, not sure how I feel about that.

Example: Currently testing with this setup, created 5 volumes on the perc controller with 5 disk running raid 0. Inside of ESXi I have 5 datastores, I added 5 SCSI disk to the FreeNas VM and then I did raid-z inside of FreeNas to create one volume. Seems to work, but I'm not sure how a failed drive will react inside of FreeNas using this setup.

I guess I'm looking for the best way to set this up to protect from a failure. Performance isn't really a factor since this is just a NAS that will store backups, photos, video, etc...

Thanks in Advanced.

 

[iceman2210]

So doing more reading on the forums, I think that I will just scrap the ESXi and just go with freenas on a USB drive in the 2950 with the MD1000 attached. I will just setup 6 or 8 of the drives in one vdev and another 6 or 7 in another vdev using raid-z2, then just vpool them together. Currently they are SAS drives, but down the road I would replace one vdev with 1TB SATA drives.

Does any one see an issue with this setup (I have 15 bays which is a little uneven for raid-z2)?

I will have to use the perc 5e controller and just raid 0 each disk like Louis did on the forums here.

Any thought on what to do with the 6 - 146GB in the PE2950? I guess I'll just make another vdev out of these...

 

[professorpolymath]

Have you considered replacing the PERC card with an HBA that supports JBOD disks? It is a shame to use ZFS and not give it proper access to the underlying disks. Whether you use FreeNAS directly or a FreeNAS VM on ESXi, it doesn't change the nature of your problem.
Incidentally, I'm running FreeNAS under ESXi with Virtual Device Mapping and it is working very well (on different hardware, obviously).