SOLVED migrating native FreeNAS to virtualization - good or bad idea?

Joined
Jan 27, 2020
Messages
577
So my Router just died due to the warm temps here in Germany - im looking at you AVM >.<
I thought about going to step up my game and deploy pfsense next to Free/TrueNAS inside a VM-Host-machine, but my hardware is almost maxed out right now - so is my wallet - which leaves me with what I have right now. (look at my signature)

Should I do it?
Is it a bumpy road to success?
Is my hardware capable of doing it?
Is migration existing zpools and jails a p.i.t.a?
Proxmox or EXSi?
 

Heracles

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Feb 2, 2018
Messages
1,401
Should I do it?

No

Is it a bumpy road to success?

Very

Is my hardware capable of doing it?

Capable does not means that is will be good for it. I think that 32G of RAM will be low for an hypervisor doing too much.

Is migration existing zpools and jails a p.i.t.a?

Not only it is, there is a high risk loosing your pool and your data.

Proxmox or EXSi?

ESXi is the only hypervisor with a minimum of work done about virtualizing FreeNAS. For those who insists to virtualize FreeNAS, it is basically the only option.

I would suggest you get yourself a Netgate SG-1100 instead should you wish to run pfSense. A Raspberry PI coupled with a switch capable of .1Q vlans or a USB Ethernet adapter is another cheap option.

To virtualize FreeNAS is asking for trouble at a scale as high as the trust and dependency you put in FreeNAS : Not at all if it is just a test lab and maximum if you put your life in it and trust it to keep it safe (which it can not do without a complete backup strategy anyway...).
 

sretalla

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Jan 1, 2016
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It's not really that bad/hard...

I do it in an ESXi host with pfSense and FreeNAS VMs with good success.

The key in the respective cases is to have a hardware PCIe card that you can pass through (HBA for FreeNAS and dual-port NIC for pfSense)... this way it's more-or-less the same as having the appliances running baremetal as far as the appliances are concerned, so they don't care that the COU and memory is coming from a hypervisor.
 
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