Newb-ish Migration-related Question

[Joe Mc]

I am currently running FreeNAS under a virtualized (ESXi) enviornment. However, I am looking to turn my physical server into a native FreeNAS box and do away with the host OS (and any other VMs) completely from this hardware. Obviously, before I do anything I'll backup my data to a separate system.

However, a couple questions/issues...

Would it be possible for me to keep all of my ZFS volumes and data in-tact on the HDDs they are currently on if I were to re-install the OS from ESXi to FreeNAS (native)? e.g. when the new system boots-up and I do a fresh installation of the same version of FreeNAS, will everything be there or would I have to start from scratch?

I do plan on keeping the same SAS controller in place after the install; right now it's functioning as a PCI pass-through (and viewed as native to the current FreeNAS VM, so maybe this helps?)

Even if the volumes and data were retained, would I better off installing fresh from scratch regardless? This has been a system that was installed several major releases ago and incrementally upgraded throughout.

 

[Joe Mc]

I think I just talked myself out of a "hot-cut" style upgrade because of looking at some of my old posts where I ran into issues with some plugins after upgrading from 9.3 -> 9.10; also, I can probably re-use the SSD I am using for VMs currently for caching/ZIL/<something useful> in FreeNAS. Still would be good to know for future reference, however.

 

[danb35]

Would it be possible for me to keep all of my ZFS volumes and data in-tact on the HDDs they are currently on if I were to re-install the OS from ESXi to FreeNAS (native)?

Should be, if as you say the disk controller is passed through directly to FreeNAS.