New to freenas, need advice

[KarmaPolice]

I am new to freenas, but have decided to adopt it for use in my work lab of 3-4 servers and 10-12 workstations...

The hardware i have is a DELL NX3100 (came with Windows Storage Server 2008)

I've had a devil of a time installing to the bare-metal of this box, it hangs at various points with and without acpi enabled...

so before i revert back to Windows Storage Server 2008 (something i really don't want to do in a mixed linux/windows environment)... i had the thought:

what if i install esxi on the bare-metal, then build a vm of freenas, and assign all the storage on the nas server (8x 450GB drives) to that vm...

does this make any sense? or am i tying my hands/going a route that doens't make any practical sense...

looking for advice...

 

[ProtoSD]

There are quite a few people trying that with varied issues. Try doing a search for 'esxi' here in the forums. It works for some and others have problems.