Migrate working Freenas installation to Esxi

[abu]

*noob warning*

Hi,

I am currently running HP Microserver N40L with 2x2TB as ZFS stripe-pool and 2x1TB as ZFS mirror on latest v8 of Freenas.
Freenas OS itself is on the USB stick which i boot from.

All this is working lovely, however I need to do some LAB's in future which would require some virtualization so I was thinking of installing ESXI 5.x.
However I don't want to loose the data.

I was thinking of copying contents of 2x1TB mirror to the 2x2TB zfs pool prior to Esxi installation and use those 2 1TB, or at least one of them for vmware storage.

Would be possible (or recommended) to install esxi on USB stick and then create virtual machine inside it with Freenas one, where I can import the old configuration (from current running freenas) and by doing that preserve the 2x2TB zfs pool and its data? Or will I end up with not being to import the volumes?

Also, are there any specific "cons" by having Freenas as virtual machine (from performance and DR perspective)?

Thanks a bunch

 

[CheesyToeNail]

I'm actually looking to do the same thing in the near future with an N36L and interested to get some feedback on this/if anyone has any personal experiences with this

 

[jgreco]

You can't do this. Unfortunately, ESXi, while allowing you to boot from USB, does not allow you to use USB as a datastore. That means that you cannot store your hypothetical FreeNAS's VM image and config on USB, which in turn means that you have no place to boot FreeNAS (or anything else) from.

You are constrained from using features like PCI passthru because it'll be an all-or-nothing choice; you either pass thru the SATA controller or you don't.

What you *can* do is to copy your data off someplace nice and safe. Then, load ESXi. Then, make those disks available to ESXi. Then, make virtual disks for FreeNAS. This stinks compared to what you'd like to do, since what you'd like to do makes a whole lot of sense.

 

[CheesyToeNail]

What if you introduced another SATA controller to the mix in, say, the form of a RAID card, connected the disks up via the RAID card and made that controller available whilst booting ESXI from something like a laptop HDD or an SSD using the motherboard controller as the ESXI host?

 

[abu]

You can't do this. Unfortunately, ESXi, while allowing you to boot from USB, does not allow you to use USB as a datastore. That means that you cannot store your hypothetical FreeNAS's VM image and config on USB, which in turn means that you have no place to boot FreeNAS (or anything else) from.

You are constrained from using features like PCI passthru because it'll be an all-or-nothing choice; you either pass thru the SATA controller or you don't.

What you *can* do is to copy your data off someplace nice and safe. Then, load ESXi. Then, make those disks available to ESXi. Then, make virtual disks for FreeNAS. This stinks compared to what you'd like to do, since what you'd like to do makes a whole lot of sense.

Hi jgreco,

Thanks for the answer. I think I was bit unclear in my OP. I was thinking of copying data from the current 2x1 TB mirror to my 2x2TB prior to installation of ESXI. ESXI would boot from USB drive but I would use one of the now free 2x1TB disks as datastore. So all virtual machines (including freeness VM) would be one these two clean 1TB disks. I would then from Freenas VM import my existing 2x2TB ZFS stripe and share it on the network with nfs/cifs etc.

 

[jgreco]

Hi jgreco,

Thanks for the answer. I think I was bit unclear in my OP. I was thinking of copying data from the current 2x1 TB mirror to my 2x2TB prior to installation of ESXI. ESXI would boot from USB drive but I would use one of the now free 2x1TB disks as datastore. So all virtual machines (including freeness VM) would be one these two clean 1TB disks. I would then from Freenas VM import my existing 2x2TB ZFS stripe and share it on the network with nfs/cifs etc.

And perhaps I jumped through my explanation a bit too quickly. My point was that you only have one SATA controller. This makes things dicey. Either FreeNAS owns the SATA controller or ESXi does. If ESXi does, then you need to be suuuuuuuper cautious because ESXi might do something helpful and unexpected like format your disks; if it doesn't, then you might be able to get a raw device mapping, but I don't *think* that works for a local SATA controller (sorry I'm not motivated enough to go try it), and so again you're back at the "no workee" scenario.

CheesyToeNail's suggestion of an additional SATA controller makes sense if you can find a way to cram it into a NxxL. That should work, but it gets a little dodgy.

 

[abu]

aha! thanks now I got it!
So basically its balls. If i only had somewhere to store 2.5TB of data temporarily while re-installing :(

 

[jgreco]

Yeah. I'm sorry. It kind of stinks. I did look later and I don't *think* you can pass through a raw local disk device to ESXi, at least on 4.1 - the comments all refer to SAN LUN mapping. From the manual:

"You can store virtual machine data on a new virtual disk, an existing virtual disk, or a mapped SAN LUN. You can copy or move virtual disks on the same host or between hosts."

What you want to do makes a whole lot of sense from a small box point of view, but without adding another controller, I don't think you can. It's not clear to me whether or not you can do PCI passthru with the NxxL's, either, though I expect some quick Googling would figure that out.