moving disks to a new host

[koifish59]

I currently have a freenas box running on bare hardware. I'm considering virtualizing this whole setup by setting up a fresh fressnas VM on a ESXi host, loading the config from the current freenas, then moving all 10 physical disks to the ESXi host with passthrough so that the VM has direct access to the disks.

Will this be any issues that the motherboard is different or the order of the SATA ports are not the same? This will involve moving from a (flashed) LSI 2308 to probably a different SATA chipset.

 

[sretalla]

moving all 10 physical disks to the ESXi host with passthrough so that the VM has direct access to the disks.

That doesn't sound like exactly what you should be doing... passing through the entire disk controller is what's needed to make it work as expected... see:

"Absolutely must virtualize FreeNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

[---- 2018/02/27: This is still as relevant as ever. As PCIe-Passthru has matured, fewer problems are reported. I've updated some specific things known to be problematic ----] [---- 2014/12/24: Note, there is another post discussing how to deploy a small FreeNAS VM instance for basic file...

www.ixsystems.com

Will this be any issues that the motherboard is different or the order of the SATA ports are not the same?

Order of the disks on the controller is not at all important.

a different SATA chipset.

Also not an issue, as long as you can pass the entire controller to the VM.