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.
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.