I am not able to see any available disks under create a pool

[RobUK]

I have a 4tb Western Digital Red disk. I have the following virtuaal disks assigned to VirtualBox and Truenas assigned as a Virtual OS.
Under storage I see what I assigned to the VM:
1. One Virtual Disk with 8GB
2. One Virtual Disk with 500gb
However under pools I do not see any available disks.
When I forst installed a VM with Truenas I was able to see the disks and create pools. Is it possible that earlier install has left some residual flags on the disk?

Any help would be appreciated. I have scratched and searched for several days at this point.
Regards,
Rob

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

You are not going to put this into production, are you? You will lose data if you run a production file server that way,

That being said assuming you are just trying TrueNAS to see if it fits, what are the precise controller and disk type settings for the virtual disks?

 

[RobUK]

Thanks for replying Patrick.

Right now I am only testing but I was thinking of putting a NAS up in the house. Why do you believe running it on a VM is unsuitable? Or is it only Oracle's VirtualBox?

Controller and Disk Settings:
Controller: AHCI, Port Count 2
Disks
Two vdi's , one 8GB and one 512GB, Sata ports 0 and 1
Disk 0 Actual size = 3.11GB
Disk 1 Actual Size = 1.66GB

Another Controller ICH6 with an optical drive on it pointing to the TrueNas iso

What is puzzling me is that when I first loaded TrueNas it worked with respect to the pools and making shares visible. It was only after reloading Truenas and starting again I experience no available disks.

Any ideas are appreciated.
Regards,
Rob

 

[RobUK]

I just tried it under VMware and got the same result. I am using TrueNas 13. My past success was under TrueNas 12. I am going to go back a rev and see if there is a difference.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Running TrueNAS in production under anything but a bare metal hypervisor is bound to lead to trouble. And if you decide to run it in VMware ESXi make sure to consult the guide on this forum. Virtual disk images for anything but the boot disk are not going to work.

Back to your experiment: AHCI should work. If you already used the same disk image for some data it might not be recognised as available. You can try nuking the disk image and creating a fresh one.

 

[Samuel Tai]

@RobUK, so long as you're only testing, and are aware of the risk of data loss using virtual disks, feel free to experiment. (See https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/zpool-permission-denied.101070/ for a thread on someone else who was experimenting with virtual disks whose VMDKs became corrupt and made his zpool unmountable.)

If you must virtualize, the supported method to attach disks is to pass through a physical HBA with physical drives.

"Absolutely must virtualize FreeNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

[---- 2018/02/27: This is still as relevant as ever. As PCIe-Passthru has matured, fewer problems are reported. I've updated some specific things known to be problematic ----] [---- 2014/12/24: Note, there is another post discussing how to deploy a small FreeNAS VM instance for basic file...

www.truenas.com

What's all the noise about HBA's, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

This is relevant to FreeNAS and TrueNAS CORE. Some parts of it might also be relevant to Scale, but I don't really know how reliable the Linux drivers are. 1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with...

www.truenas.com

 

[RobUK]

of interest is that I went back to V12 and I was then able to see the virtual disks. So it would seem to be a change in V13

You are going a long way to discouraging me from using a VM. I did not want to use bare metal and have a second machine, keyboard and mouse and additional power outlet.

However, thanks for all your help.