Moving from Native FreeNAS to Virtualised(ESXi)

[joeschmuck]

I am going to avoid this whole mess. I will skip esxi and directly install FreeNAS on a drive and be done with it. I do not need any of the VM technology per say but was looking to consolidate FreeNAS and a small webserver I run. I will just keep them separate or if need be, look into FreeNAS containers and spin up Linux inside of FreeNAS if push comes to shove.

ESXi is very easy to install and to setup a VM of FreeNAS/TrueNAS (of course I say that after having years of experience with ESXi). But TrueNAS 12.0-U1 is not rock solid, I would advise you use FreeNAS 11.3-U5 initially, get it all working perfectly, then at a later date if needed, upgrade to TrueNAS once the bugs are worked out. I tried TrueNAS 12.0-U1 on my VM and it didn't last more than 13 hours before it had a problem, I didn't troubleshoot it because I didn't have time to sit down and do that.

The most difficult part is passing through your hard drives and your Ethernet port. The guides are pretty good as well.

I respect that you would rather not mess with it but if there comes a time where you desire to do this, you have the guides and people here willing to assist you. Just make sure you have reasonable hardware or you might be fighting it all the way.

if need be, look into FreeNAS containers and spin up Linux inside of FreeNAS if push comes to shove.

A new version of TrueNAS will be based on Linux in the future (about a year) to replace the FreeBSD version, but the current version of TrueNAS/FreeNAS will support a Linux OS. Search the internet for "freenas linux jail" or something like that, I'm sure you will find something. Make sure you have enough RAM to support it.

 

[ChrisRJ]

@dvpatel
I would defintly recommend to run it on ESXI it was the best decision I ever made.

I must admit that I have mixed feelings about such "across-the-board" recommendations. This can work out just great, with enough knowledge, scrutiny, and a bit of luck. But too many people just blindly jump onto this without realizing what they are getting into. No offense intended, but a friendly comment.

 

[dvpatel]

@dvpatel

I would defintly recommend to run it on ESXI it was the best decision I ever made.

True. But I have brand new old stock TS440s. They came with the M1015 (LSI 9240-8i) stock and ESXI 7.0 dropped support for those cards. Since the card (unlike the older ones) natively supports JBOD, that is what prompted my question. I can currently run 8 drives off of it and 4 more off the motherboard and I have drive cages for all. 4x3.5 and 8x2.5. If I pass through the card, I lose 8 drives' worth of capacity. Which is what prompted my next question of if I can just pass through a subset of the disks.

 

[HoneyBadger]

True. But I have brand new old stock TS440s. They came with the M1015 (LSI 9240-8i) stock and ESXI 7.0 dropped support for those cards. Since the card (unlike the older ones) natively supports JBOD, that is what prompted my question. I can currently run 8 drives off of it and 4 more off the motherboard and I have drive cages for all. 4x3.5 and 8x2.5. If I pass through the card, I lose 8 drives' worth of capacity. Which is what prompted my next question of if I can just pass through a subset of the disks.

No, but you could rearrange the SAS cables so that you only pass through the onboard SATA controller to the VM, and would end up with four drives (4x out of the 8x2.5 cage, presumably) being directly visible to TrueNAS, and the other 4x2.5 + 4x3.5 are usable at the ESXi level.

Although as you stated, 7.0 dropped support for the SAS2008. Could pick up a SAS2308 based card if you need that to be usable at the ESXi level, but generally you don't use a cacheless JBOD style HBA there unless you're building vSAN.

Maybe a separate thread with your prospective build and goals would be advised?