Installing FreeNAS 8.03 -- VM vs Standalone

[Dooldeniya]

Hi all,

I am moving to FreeNAS for my home server and am trying to determine the advantage/disadvantage of doing a standalone install or setting up FreeNAS as a VM. I plan to use ZFS so I know I'll have to allocate >= 6GB memory to VM if I go that route. I searched through the forums for a adv/disadv summary of one vs the other but didn't find anything... and wanted to get input from the community.

Thanks,
-Chanaka

 

[louisk]

IO is one of the worst things you can virtualize, and, to my knowledge, there are no paravirt drivers for FreeBSD. Since the entire purpose of FreeNAS is doing IO, I think you would see an advantage in terms of machine efficiency by going to a VM, but you would see very slow IO. Any advantage you hope to gain from using ZFS will be mitigated by your using a virtual disk on another filesystem. The only way you could get around this is to somehow use RAW disk in your virtual machine instead of a disk image. For me, there was no question what was more important. I can get about 600Mbit in/out of my FreeNAS, at which point I don't have sufficient hardware at my house to push it further.

 

[Daisuke]

Just use one of your old computers with at least 8GB of RAM.

 

[joeschmuck]

You should have posted this in a section like Forums/Installation vice How-To-Guides since you are not writing a how to guide here which is what this section is really for. I'll ask to have this moved to a proper location.

To answer your question, in my opinion if you have server class hardware you could get away in a VM and there are advantages but I wouldn't imagine that to be in a home or small work environment. 4GB RAM minimum should be allocated in the VM to run FreeNAS 8.x which meant you will need more than that to run you host OS and the VM software + the 4GB minimum. 6GB or better for the VM is what you should shoot for. If you are only testing FreeNAS in a VM, 4GB is fine.

As louisk said, you need to access the hard drives directly and not through VM drives if you are seriously looking into this option. And as TECK said and I think everyone would recommend here, use an older computer. Make sure it has 8GB RAM and the 1Gb NIC, you should be ready to go.

There are postings in the forums about the pros and cons of using a VM, they are just hidden well.

 

[Dooldeniya]

Thanks for all the input. It's clear that a VM solution is not the best option.

Joe, thanks for the redirect. I realized I had posted in the wrong forum but didn't know how to move it.

 

[joeschmuck]

Yea, for testing I think VM is fine but when you want to run a home system you are better off with a dedicated system. The system doesn't need to be anything special except it should have 6 to 8GB of RAM. Good luck.