Is this even possible? FreeNAS on ESXi 6.5 with consumer equipment

[CaedenV]

TLDR version:
I want to run FreeNAS as a VM on ESXi with drive passthrough, but am having difficulties; How robust is the new VM support in FreeNAS 11, and would it work to run FreeNAS as a VM host for Windows and Linux machines?

Long version:
So.... Over the summer I had a big beautiful motherboard drop in my lap (Gigabyte GA-x79-UP4) with 10 SATA ports (+2 eSATA ports!), and it came with a 4-core i7, but I can upgrade to an 8 core Xeon chip for cheap, and when combining ram I am at ~50GB of DDR3 (with a max of 65GB).
I was able to migrate/reinstall from my old AMD A10 FreeNAS box successfully with minimal issues, but as 'just a file server' this is kind of a waste of hardware, so my thought is to play with fire and run ESXi 6.5 host and then run FreeNAS as a VM with VT-d enabled to pass most of the HDDs through to the FreeNAS VM.
At least, it seemed like a good idea at the time hahahaha

First issue was that while the Marvel SATA controlers are recognized, they are not supported; Enabled 'community device support' via a SSH session, and got that bit working
Second issue appears to be a known bug with my particular motherboard. When VT-d is enabled, the HDDs do not show up in ESXi at all. When VT-d is disabled the drive show up, but I cannot pass them through to a VM directly.

So here is my setup:
8 HDDs (soon to be 12!)
-Intel controller has 6 3TB drives, and they all work just fine
-Marvel1 currently has 2 3TB drives, but will be adding another 2 drives shortly
-Marvel2 will have 2 smaller 1TB drives that I want to use as drive space for housing VMs

When running FreeNAS this is no big deal because it does all of the RADI/ZFS in software, so being on multiple controllers works just fine. Option #1 is using the on-board RAID controllers to create several small RAIDs, and then present them as data pools to FreeNAS... but I would loose a lot of drive space to redundancy. Not all bad... but not ideal either. I could do a RAID5 on the 6 Intel drives, and a RAID 5 on the Marvel, and still have 2 drives of redundancy that I have now... but just 1 redundancy per pool which scares me a bit (some of my drives are consumer grade from when I started this project a few years ago... I am on borrowed time on those devices). Plus, I am not a fan of making a mess of the pools. I would prefer to have 1 large pool of drives with redundancy... like the big ZFS that I have been using up until now.
Plus, from what I am reading, ESXi does not have very good software RAID driver support, so this may not work in the first place as I am not running a 'real' RAID controller.

Option #2 is to somehow make pools and present them to FreeNAS
Perhaps 1 pool per physical drive, and then have ZFS on the FreeNAS side? But I have no idea if 'that is a thing' or how FreeNAS would react to that. Or I could create one big pool of all 10 drives which FreeNAS uses... but my understanding of pools (admittedly limited) is that it does not do any form of RAID or redundancy.

Option #3
I just Redid my friend's FreeNAS box (which all my data is backed up on, and why I can afford to play with mine right now) I noticed there is a VM option in FreeNAS 11. So perhaps I don't use ESXi at all, and instead use the VM capabilities of FreeNAS itself. Perhaps not as fun and sexy as ESXi... but if it can run a few small game servers, and perhaps 2-3 Windows/Linux VMs, then I think it would be 'good enough' for now.

The ultimate goal is to be able to use my box for more things. The purpose is mostly to learn stuff... but on the cheap. I want to run a linux VM as a DC so I can learn more computer management options for work. I have a bunch of ubiquity APs that need an always-on windows host as a controller. I would like to spin up the occasional game server (for Minecraft and the like). If I get really ambitious then I would like to set up a security camera server (Milestone is free for up to 8 cameras I think). If FreeNAS's VM hosting is up for these kinds of tasks then great; but I really want to use ESXi just for exposure and learning that system if possible.

Anywho, any thoughts or ideas would be much appreciated!
Thanks for the help!

 

[Chris Moore]

I want to run FreeNAS as a VM on ESXi with drive passthrough, but am having difficulties; How robust is the new VM support in FreeNAS 11, and would it work to run FreeNAS as a VM host for Windows and Linux machines?

If you already have ESXi, why would you use FreeNAS to virtualize anything?
Take a look at this build:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...sdv-tln4f-esxi-freenas-aio.57116/#post-401275

Anywho, any thoughts or ideas would be much appreciated!

That board may sound wonderful to you but it is less than ideal, and after reading through the rest of your post, you should have come asking for advice sooner.
What you need to use is a SAS HBA instead of those built in drive controllers. Then you can pass the whole HBA and all the attached drives in to the VM.

PS. Those boards are selling between $500 and $250 on eBay. You should sell it and get a real server board instead.
One like this would be good:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-SuperM...Motherboard-Xeon-E5-2600-1600-V2/202101957077

You can use the same Xeon CPU

 

[CaedenV]

That board may sound wonderful to you but it is less than ideal, and after reading through the rest of your post, you should have come asking for advice sooner.
What you need to use is a SAS HBA instead of those built in drive controllers. Then you can pass the whole HBA and all the attached drives in to the VM.

Well, I am out a whole $0 so it is far FAR better than the AMD A-10 I have been running the last year or so. The funny thing is that the 1.1 version of my board does not have this bug... but even used it costs ~$200 or so.
Eventually (ie after I pay for a roof, and 2 decks, and probably an HVAC after that lol) I will buy some actual server hardware to avoid these kinds of issues and 'do it right'. But for the moment I am 'doing it cheap'.

So what do you think? Any hope? or am I limited for now to the VM capabilities of FreeNAS 11?

Also, AWESOME walkthrough. I have already learned a lot from it!

 

[CaedenV]

If you already have ESXi, why would you use FreeNAS to virtualize anything?
PS. Those boards are selling between $500 and $250 on eBay. You should sell it and get a real server board instead.
One like this would be good:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-SuperM...Motherboard-Xeon-E5-2600-1600-V2/202101957077

You can use the same Xeon CPU

Hmmm, I hadn't considered selling the board... Guess I'll run on FreeNAS for a bit and see if I can sell the board for a decent price.

 

[Chris Moore]

You should be able to run a SAS controller card like this:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/9201-16i-H...Express-2-0-SAS-6Gbps-for-Server/192044684746
and use cables like this:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/2xMini-SAS...-Breakout-Internal-Cable-19-Inch/332140607861
to connect your drives and be able to pass the controller into FreeNAS in a VM.
You will need VT-d enabled and, like you said, that kills some of the built-in ports. This should work.
Worst case, you need to flash this card to IT (initiator target) mode or update the firmware.

 

[CaedenV]

well... like I said... roof, decks, hvac...
I unfortunately have other priorities at the moment. Trying to do things free for now.

The eventual plan (in ~2-3 years?) is to buy a nice fat 4U rack server with lots of drives and GPUs. Then Run 4-5 gaming VMs that me and the kiddos can log into remotely on nice cheap/quiet/powerefficient laptops or tablets. But for now it is just a hoby with parts that I can scavenge.

 

[Chris Moore]

With the limitation of not spending any money, it looks like you will have to run FreeNAS on bare metal and use it for virtualization. You may be able to sell the fancy system board for enough money to buy a server board and an HBA.
This model is a little less money and gives you 8 ports:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-H310-...-BIOS-ROM-Low-Profile-ZFS-unRAID/162601640763

 

[Dice]

Sometimes you cannot get cake for free.
If 0 spending is priority, make your setup as basic as possible, as close to the hardware resource document as possible.

Avoid attempting pass-through of the built in marvel and what not chips.
If passthrough I'd get an individual HBA, in all other cases than having a LSI onboard a SM motherboard - a combo that is proven.

 

[CaedenV]

Sometimes you cannot get cake for free.
If 0 spending is priority, make your setup as basic as possible, as close to the hardware resource document as possible.

Avoid attempting pass-through of the built in marvel and what not chips.
If passthrough I'd get an individual HBA, in all other cases than having a LSI onboard a SM motherboard - a combo that is proven.

Yep, cheap only gets you so far in life lol
I got FreeNAS 11 installed last night and the system seems happy now, so I am going to leave it be. For the kinds of VMs I am planning to run it looks like FreeNAS's options are good enough. I was mostly hoping to get ESXi working because I am using it more and more at work and would like to play with it at home where I don't need to worry about breaking things.

Thanks for the help guys!

 

[Chris Moore]

I was mostly hoping to get ESXi working because I am using it more and more at work and would like to play with it at home where I don't need to worry about breaking things.

You just need a little better support for VT-d and that workstation board (although good) doesn't quite get there in the hardware compatibility department. Like I said, if you can sell it for enough money to offset the cost of a Supermicro board that would use the same CPU and RAM, and get one of the HBA cards I pointed out to you, you could definitely get ESXi running and get FreeNAS virtualized. Several people here are doing it. Then they use the storage from FreeNAS to as a data-store for other VMs. It is all very interesting. Makes me want to give it a try, but I think I will need better hardware too.