HP Gen8 ESXi 6.5 & FreeNAS

[Mark WatIng]

Hi all,

After a lot of reading and investigation I wanted to test a scenario wth you to see whether my proposed 'build' would/should work.

Build :

• HP Gen 8
• 16GB USB Internal Drive
• 4x3TB WD Drivers attached to the onboard RAID controller (B120i)
• HP P410 RAID Controller installed into the PICE slot.
• 525SSD attached to the HP P410
• Xeon 1265L Processor
• 16GB ECC.

What I want to do is run FreeNas as a VM and passthrough the 4x3TB drives to this VM as cleanly as possible. I then want to run 4 other VMs and use the FreeNas storage for data stores but not the VM itself.

Plan of activities:

• Flash HP Gen8 to latest BIOS
• ESXi 6.5 installed to the internal USB drive.
• Turn of the B120i Raid controller and enable ACHI Mode for the 4x3TB drives.
• Create a FreeNAS VM onto the SSD Card (attached to the H410 Controller) and passthrough the 4x3TB drivers (B120 controller).
• Install and create the other VMs onto the SSD.
• I will then make the FreeNAS Storage available via Shares for Data etc to the VM’s.

This should give me a VM FreeNAS with ‘direct’ access to the drives to create ZFS pools/volumes, and then 3-4 VM’s to run (Apple Server, Windows Server, XPEnology and Ubuntu).

Do you think this will work?

Many thanks,
Mark.

 

[Vito Reiter]

You really shouldn't run FreeNAS in a VM, you know, you could just install FreeNAS on a drive and run VM's inside FreeNAS? I've never really seen a situation where there wasn't a problem with FreeNAS in a VM and it has the capabilities to run VM's in it so there'd just be a better way to do it. All of the VM's in FreeNAS would have their storage pointed at your array of drives given they're all setup correctly.

Although that makes perfect sense in theory, Murphy is real and you don't want to add more reasons for things to go wrong. Hope this helps :)

 

[Jailer]

Do you think this will work?

Don't know, you're the first I've seen posting on the forums with that as an esxi host. The biggest issue is whether or not you can pass the controller through. You could try an install and see if you can obtain any smart data from the drives with FreeNAS running. But even if you can I would test it for quite some time just to be sure.

 

[Mark WatIng]

Thanks Vito - I take the point that the above is quite a complicated set up and problems will occur. I've struggled with FreeNAS VM's (running under a VM itself on my desktop for testing) - especially the Apple Server and XPEnology - struggled to get them to boot.

Not convinced how 'good' bhyve is for virutlisation (this is probably more me than bhyve) re XPEnology and Apple Server.

 

[Ralf_Klein]

To install VMware ESXi 6.5 on a HPE server GEN8 / GEN9 you need the HPE installation medium from the VMware website. Otherwise, you must make your own installation CD. Most of the HPE storage and Ethernet controller are not recognized by the normal ESXi CD.

 

[Mark WatIng]

Agreed Ralf - I have downloaded from the VMware site already

 

[Spearfoot]

You can virtualize FreeNAS on ESXi and it works very well -- see 'my systems' below for details about my three AIO (All-In-One) servers. But you really, really have to mind your p's and q's...

There are a few problems with your proposed build:

• HP isn't very DYI-friendly; sometimes you have to have a support contract in place to download firmware updates.
• As @Ralf_Klein points out, you have to jump through hoops to install ESXi on HP Gen8 systems.
  
• The RAID controller you're considering doesn't support actual disk passthrough, you'd have to use RWD (Raw Device Mapping). This might work... but I personally wouldn't trust it to store my data.

I'm not saying you can't use other hardware... but most of the successful AIO systems you'll find on the forum are Supermicro-based.

 

[Mark WatIng]

thanks Spearfoot - I'm heavily invested in the HP Gen8 (cash I've thrown at it) - in hindsight should of cut my loses before upgrading. Perhaps the best option is now moving to FreeNas on bare metal HP Gen 8 and hope that bhyve supports Apple Server in the future

Thanks,
Mark.