Installation in vmware best practices clarification

[SAM_alex]

I want to install freenas in vmware.
I also need a windows installation on the same machine so I tried to install freenas as primary OS but the windows installation had very poor performance.

I found this article (http://www.freenas.org/blog/yes-you-can-virtualize-freenas/) but i have 2 questions.
1. "The second precaution is to disable any write caching that is happening on the SAN, NAS, or RAID controller itself"
I'm using only dedicated disks not virtual disks.
Do I need to change something to the default instalation to disable write caching?
Also this means that I can't use a dedicated ssd for caching?

2. "If you are not using PCI passthrough (more on that below), then you must disable the scrub tasks in ZFS."
I'm not using PCI passthrough but i am dedicating whole disks for freenas storage with the vmware workstation "use a physical disk" function.
I this case can I use the scrub function of the ZFS file system?

The machine i'm using is a HP Proliant ML10 v2 withe xeon 1230 v3, 24 gb ecc, and the raid controller disabled.
Thank you for all the help.

 

[joeschmuck]

The main thing here is are you using VMDK files or are you using RDM. If you are using RDM, that is essentially the same as pass-through. If you are using VMDK files then you should adhere to the cautions.

 

[SAM_alex]

I checked an saw that the vm did create a vmdk file for each of the drives but is very small 1kb.

Regarding the caching issue, can i add a SLOG or L2ARC ssd?

 

[joeschmuck]

I checked an saw that the vm did create a vmdk file for each of the drives but is very small 1kb.

Regarding the caching issue, can i add a SLOG or L2ARC ssd?

You are using Workstation so I'm not sure why you would want to add an SLOG or L2ARC, do you have any idea how these things work? How much RAM do you have for your FreeNAS VM? And I suspect the vmdk file is the link file to use the whole drive as an RDM drive, this is normal and okay. You can actually verify this by running in a shell smartctl -a /dev/da1 and the entire output is present and it's not a VMWare virtual disk.

You are new to FreeNAS, please don't make the mistake many people do which is to try and throw all the options into your FreeNAS machine without having a sound understanding of how they work and where they are good. If you are just playing with a VM to see how you can configure things, that is okay, but if you are looking for performance, not a good idea without knowing what you are doing.

My advice is for you to determine exactly what you need your future FreeNAS system to do, it's capacity, and then don't cut corners building it.

EDIT: If I came off a bit too harsh, I appoligize, it's been a rough day and I didn't mean to sound mean, that is not they way I am in general.

 

[SAM_alex]

The command returns virtual disk so i wont be running any scrubs.

As you suggested I started following the courses on iXuniversity so i get some knowledge in the freenas os.

Thank you