New System - Am I biting off more then I can chew

[cobalt]

Hello Forum - thanks in advance for any suggestions!

I find myself embarking on a new challenge. Last year I replaced my sons hammy-down, Dell PC with an iMac. My 14 year old son is an avid photographer and my 13 year old son with a MacBook is into taking videos. I have my own MacBook Pro and I am also into photography, with both of us shooting in RAW and editing in CS5, we are generating some large files which quickly consume 1 TB hard drives.
I soon realized that a NAS type storage solution might be the answer to our space challenges. After some research last year, I decided to repurpose the Dell PC into a Freenas box. It took me a bit to get it working, but for a year, all was grand. We used the Freenas to run time machine backups and to store shared files. It really worked great.
Along comes Lion ... after I install it on two of the four Macs our family run, I realized Lion and Freenas (pre 8) don't work. So I did some research to figure out how to get us back to where we were. Long story short, I decide to challenge myself with my first computer build. I spent hours on the internet looking for a hardware solution that would meet my need for a freeness 8 system, running ZFS and while at the same time offering a computer building experience and challenge for my sons and me.
During the course of my research, I stumbled across the "Hakintosh". I had heard of this before, but never paid it much attention. So....I want to really challenge my limited computer abilities and build myself a system that can do two things - a Hakintosh and a Freenas 8 machine.

I know I'll probably take some heat for this, but I'm sure the thought of landing earth dwelling men on the moon had many raising their eyebrows as well.
I have searched the internet for days trying to find a system that is running in this dual configuration I describe. Has it been done, can it be done, am I crazy for trying?

My first concept was to run the rig as a freenas system by configuring the system in two setups - when I want to run Freenas, I boot from the CF card and when I want run the hakintosh, I boot from an SSD drive. My thought was to have 5 - 1TB WD caviar green drives from my original Freenas 7 system, along with the 8gb CF card run the Freenas 8 setup. The Hakintosh would boot from the new 60GB SSD drive and use a new 1 TB seagate drive as its file storage area. Right off the bat, I realize I would not be able to use Freenas when Hakintosh is running, therefore I would not be able to share files or TM backup from Hakintosh to Freenas.

My second concept was to configure the Hakintosh with a virtual machine environment that Freenas would reside in. I have little knowledge of VM programs or operations, so I am not sure if that would work or not.

I have already purchased the hardware for my Hakintosh build (it has not yet shipped)

Fractal Design Define R3 case (capacity of (8) internal 3.5 drives)
Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3
CPU - Intel i52500k
Mem - CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CMZ16GX3M4A1600C9B
PSU - Seasonic SS-560KM
SSD - Corsair Force 3 60GB Sata III - CSSD-F60GB3-BK
HDD - Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 1 TB Sata 6.0Gb/s
HDD - WD Caviar Green WD10000CSRTL 1TB 5400 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s X 5 existing drives
NIC - Intel EXPI9301CTBLK Network Adapter 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI-Express 1 x RJ45
SATA Controller - SYBA SY-PEX40008 PCI Express SATA II (3.0Gb/s) (to offer enough connection ability to all drives and CF card)

I know this hardware is way beyond the needs of freenas 8, and I am worried it may even be too modern to work with Freenas, but I am not one to easily walk away from a challenge. I am open to all comments and suggestions, including "you're out of your mind for trying".
I usually try and keep things at the KISS level (keep it simple stupid) but I find myself with some time off from work this holiday weekend and figured my young lads could gain some valuable experience (or perhaps a new vocabulary from Dad) after this is all done.

Thanks for the input and help.

 

[jgreco]

I'll point out what may not be immediately obvious but is clear to me: you may be better served to ditch the FreeNAS, lose ZFS, and just rely on Mac OS X and the server features that you can enable within it. OS X does support some basic RAID features, mirroring for sure. Getting a NAS environment to work with OS X is a bit of an uphill battle, though you have done it and so can certainly do it again. A NAS that isn't 24/7 available is more of a pain in the rear with OS X.

You might also be able to do something like VMware Fusion and see if you can get FreeNAS running virtually on top of your OS X, Fusion's nice but I haven't tried this. I believe there's a free trial for Fusion if you dig a bit. It'd be worth trying.

 

[cobalt]

I have been successful with my new system build. I have OSX Lion fully functional. I have had success in loading the latest build of Freenas 8, although there are still some bugs being worked out on Freenas end as related to the functionality of volumes and datasets.
For now I am changing the boot sequence through the bios to go to Freenas or to go to OSX. I have five 1TB drives for Freenas and one 1TB HDD and one 60 GB SSD for running the OSX side.

I wanted to assure that both systems would function on this hardware build, and they do, so now I have some decisions to make regarding how I am going to run this setup. I am looking for input from others.

I know that a Freenas should be on a dedicated box, but for now I want to have the ability to run OSX as well.

What are the pitfalls to running Freenas on a VM type setup?

Are there any other solutions that might work?

 

[jgreco]

If you want to commit to running OS X 24/7, you can virtualize the FreeNAS and run on Fusion. The primary thing to be cautious of here is not to introduce a dependency; the OS X box must be completely free of dependence on the FreeNAS box (no required mounts, no auth services, etc).

Haven't tried OS X/Fusion/FreeNAS so I can't advise as to how it might work. I can tell you that I've had no problems with FreeNAS on VMware ESXi, and have been fairly pleased with it. You would seem to have a great rig on which to try it, as you aren't yet committed to any course.

 

[cobalt]

Jgreco, thanks for your response and advice. Can you offer clarification on running Freenas on VM .... I am trying to wrap my head around this ... with five 1TB HDD to dedicate to ZFS RaidZ, what would happen if one of those physical drives goes bad? Is that considered a downside to running it through a VM configuration? I am not clear on how the VM utilizes the physical drives, does it simply see them combined as a single drive? Can you direct to a study resource for VM ?

 

[jgreco]

I am quite frankly not familiar with this aspect of VMware Fusion. I can explain that in ESXi, there are several ways in which a device might be passed through to the guest VM, the best of which is actually passing the PCI SATA controller to the guest, so that ESXi is not very involved with anything to do with the hard disks. I don't think you can do that in Fusion... too bad. The real question is if you can attach unused disk devices to the VM directly, and I just don't have an absolute answer to that question.

From a UNIXy point of view, there's very little difference between a file and a disk device. You can open, read, seek, and write both. However, some operating systems suck, and VMware's default method for creating virtual disks attempts to work around that, while also allowing for something called "vmfs" which is their own virtualization-supporting filesystem. So most VM's in the world actually exist as virtual machine disk files (vmdk's) on some other filesystem, typically vmfs or NFS (for ESXi) or NTFS (for VMware Workstation) or HFS (for VMware Fusion) or whatever for other VMware products. MOST VMware users are looking to support multiple operating systems on their single computer, so designing VMware to mostly support multiple virtual disks on a single physical disk or filesystem should make a lot of sense when you think about that. But you're looking to invert that... you want to provide access to multiple physical disks on your system to a VMware VM. It's probably capable of it, but it isn't the default mode that most people seek. So you're going to have to paddle upriver a bit.

In the worst case scenario (that I can think of), you might need to format/partition/newfs each disk under OS X, and create a virtual machine disk file (vmdk) on those drives, which you then pass to FreeNAS as "disks". This would work similarly to just passing the raw devices, but you become unnecessarily dependent on the OS X filesystem abstraction layer (which you don't want or need) to manage those vmdk files. Passing the raw disks would be better. I'm *guessing* that this can be done, there are people out on the 'net who seem to have done it, see for example

http://www.vijayp.ca/blog/?p=146

but it doesn't appear to be supported via the GUI.

If you can attach the disk devices directly to the VM, they'll appear to the VM as (probably) SCSI disk devices, and will have very good performance characteristics. This is the Highly Preferred Method, and allows you to take the best advantage of FreeNAS, ZFS, and all the related capabilities. If you have to use the OS X method, you can either generate vmdk files on each drive, and export them to the VM as multiple disks, which'll perform pretty well, or you can use OS X and its RAID capabilities to create a larger OS X drive, then generate vmdk files on *that*, and export that to the VM as a single big disk. I don't suggest that since it makes you heavily reliant on OS X, and you'd be better off just using OS X to serve your files at that point.

 

[cobalt]

jgreco,

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I installed VMware Fusion 4 on my OS X Lion system. I was able to use an obscure command within Fusion that allows me to create virtual disk from each physical disk. This provides me with storage pool that does work with ZFS. I did some initial testing to determine if a drive failure would be something I could recover from. I setup a ifs raid Z with three 1 TB drives. I placed some files on this new dataset and was successful in accessing them from a different computer on the network. I was also able to access them from the computer that Fusion was running on. In essence it does not know it is the same computer as the VM thinks it is its own computer, so I was pleased that the first test passed.
I then simulated a drive failure, by simply unplugging one of the three drives that were in the ifs pool (I did this with the system powered down) I rebooted, rebooted Fusion, opened Freenas and was alerted that the pool was functional but degraded.
I then powered everything down, and installed a new drive, plugged into the same SATA port was the "failed" drive. After some spool clean up work, the pool came back to full strength, with no faults indicated and the files were still accessible. So the next test was successful.

I did encounter a few items of concern. If the main computer shuts down, the reboot process is not automated. I can set the computer to reboot to its pre-shut down state, however I am not certain if Fusion will restart on its own. I also have to enter an admin password upon Fusion booting up, as the physical disks require admin, password access. I am looking into this to see if there is a solution. Finally, I do not know yet if Freenas will boot on its own, once Fusion is running.

The good news is that the system is operational. Thanks for the assistance in getting me to this point. I have a very unique setup and look forward to tying up the loose ends!

 

[jgreco]

Let us know how it goes. You now know more about Fusion than I do.