Migrating an ESXi/napp-it system to ESXi/FreeNAS

[Darren David]

Hi folks-

I've got what I feel is a fairly unique situation here and I'm hoping to confirm my thinking to see if I can make this migration work. I have an ESXi 5.5 system that is using napp-it on the storage layer that I'd like to migrate to FreeNAS, along with an existing FreeNAS zfs pool. Let me describe these two systems in detail.

System 1

• Server running ESXi 5.5
• LSI SAS controller with 8 x 4TB WD Red drives (24 hot-swap bays)
• napp-it VM on SSD drive
• Hardware passthrough in VMware on the LSI for direct access to the drives by napp-it
• RAIDZ2 in napp-it, single pool (let's call it "poolA")
• virtual eSAN network in VMware, each VM drive is an NFS share back to a unique napp-it dataset

System 2

• Server running ESXi 5.5
• LSI SAS controller with 8 x 10TB WD red drives
• FreeNAS 11.2-U1 on SSD drive
• Hardware passthrough in VMware on the LSI for direct access to the drives by FreeNAS
• RAIDZ2 in FreeNAS, single pool (lets call it "poolB")
• no other VMs

In short, I'd like to combine these two systems and their pools into a single system, with both pools to be managed by FreeNAS. My plan is to do the following:

• Power down all the VMs on System 1 with the exception of the napp-it vm
• 'zfs export poolA' on System 1/napp-it
• shut down the napp-it VM
• 'zfs export poolB' on System 2/FreeNAS
• Migrate the physical drives from System 2 to System 1
• Migrate the FreeNAS VM from System 2 to System 1
• Switch the LSI passthrough on System 1 from the napp-it VM to the FreeNAS vm
• Power up the FreeNAS VM and import poolB, confirm that everything works as it used to on System 2
• Import poolA into FreeNAS
• Set up shares for the datasets that held the individual VMs on poolA in FreeNAS and make sure that ESXi sees them as before
• Power up the other legacy VMs on System 1
• Profit

I'm basically looking for a sanity check on this plan - this all assumes that ZFS on napp-it is compatible with ZFS on FreeNAS, and that's what I'm unsure of. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

Darren

 

[Meyers]

You seem to know what you're doing so I'll just assume you did your research on how to properly virtualize FreeNAS. The only thing I'd add is to make sure your backups are good. Otherwise it looks like a solid plan to me.

 

[Darren David]

You seem to know what you're doing so I'll just assume you did your research on how to properly virtualize FreeNAS. The only thing I'd add is to make sure your backups are good. Otherwise it looks like a solid plan to me.

I appreciate the vote of confidence, always welcome. ;) I'm trusting that this post is still valid/comprehensive 4 years later (I am running ESXi 5.5 which came out around then, anyway) so that's my base plan for now.

Darren