New motherboar

[Charlie86]

Hi,

I need to move my freenas to new PC.

Now i have some old HP with 5 sata ports + ibm 1015.
In total I have 9 3TB drives in raidz1
New motherboard have 8 sata ports, so I will use all of them + one from ibm 1015.

My question is;
Will data from old raid be accesseble from my new setup or I need to copy data to some other storage and create new pool on new freenas.
Old freenas was booting from USB drive.
New one will be VM in ESXi. All drives and controlers will be in passthrough mode in esxi.

 

[sretalla]

Will data from old raid be accesseble from my new setup or I need to copy data to some other storage and create new pool on new freenas.

FreeNAS is not married to your hardware, you can move it and provided the components are compatible (particular note is the NIC, which may change from em0 or igb0 to vmx0 or something like that, so jail config may need revision).

Your RAIDZ1 pool will be recognized without issue.

New one will be VM in ESXi. All drives and controlers will be in passthrough mode in esxi.

Take care to read this:

"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

Also, note that if you're planning on using your Mobo SATA ports, this may be complicated in terms of passing through the controller as you will probably be booting ESXi from that same controller, hence will not be able to (unless you run ESXi off USB... so I would recommend that option).

 

[HoneyBadger]

Also, note that if you're planning on using your Mobo SATA ports, this may be complicated in terms of passing through the controller as you will probably be booting ESXi from that same controller, hence will not be able to (unless you run ESXi off USB... so I would recommend that option).

You'll still need a location to store the .vmx (virtual machine configuration) file for FreeNAS itself, and ESXi by default won't use USB devices for datastores.

@Charlie86 if your new motherboard supports booting ESXi from NVMe devices (even better if it has a compatible M.2 slot), you could purchase a small NVMe SSD to use for ESXi boot and a small datastore. Store the FreeNAS VM there, and pass through both your onboard SATA and SAS controllers to FreeNAS.

Otherwise, you will need a second storage controller or an expander for the M1015 (and associated extra cabling) - I would go with an expander and booting ESXi from a SATA SSD.

Show : Unsupported and probably-not-recommended option

If your ESXi USB boot device is an SSD or HDD (and not a cheap USB stick) then go through the necessary overrides/hacking to make it use it as a datastore. But put nothing on it except the FreeNAS .vmx and boot vmdk. Don't try to use it for any other VMs, and seriously consider one of the other options instead. Don't do this at all if you're going to boot ESXi from a USB stick.