Newbie HELP! Run FreeNAS on ESXi with Partitional USB? Possible?

[anup8788]

Hi All,

I’m all new to this, and need some help.

I've bought an HP Micro Server which has 4 SATA bays and I want to use all of them for storage.

I’ve got a 16gb high speed usb which speed read at 30mb and write 20mb, would i be able to partition that usb into two and install ESXi on 1 partition and FreeNAS VM on another partition? And then use all sata bays as storage in FreeNAS?

Is this possible?

Thanks all in advance. ;)

 

[William Grzybowski]

No, FreeNAS is not a simple OS that can be installed in a partition. It has its own partition table with 4 partitions in MBR.

FWIW, it does not make sense to dual boot FreeNAS with anything else.

 

[anup8788]

any recommendations?

No, FreeNAS is not a simple OS that can be installed in a partition. It has its own partition table with 4 partitions in MBR.

FWIW, it does not make sense to dual boot FreeNAS with anything else.

Thanks for your quick reply, what would be the best way to have FreeNAS and + use 4 sata as Storage, will it be ok if I have 2 USB's? 1 running ESXi and another running FreeNAS VM? I dont want to waste the 4 sata bay for installing ESXi or FreeNAS, just want to keep them for NAS Storage.

Thanks again for your help.

 

[William Grzybowski]

I don't get what you're trying to do. It just does not make any sense.

Do you know what FreeNAS is, exactly?

Why not run FreeNAS on top of ESXi then?

 

[jgreco]

You'd be leaving the ESXi instance with no place to run VM's from. ESXi will not install VM's on a flash drive, so even if you got yourself another flash drive, that's a problem. It'd be real clever to be able to run ESXi and then run FreeNAS within it to give yourself more space for VM's, but there are some practical bootstrapping issues which I've outlined before.

 

[anup8788]

Thank you

You'd be leaving the ESXi instance with no place to run VM's from. ESXi will not install VM's on a flash drive, so even if you got yourself another flash drive, that's a problem. It'd be real clever to be able to run ESXi and then run FreeNAS within it to give yourself more space for VM's, but there are some practical bootstrapping issues which I've outlined before.

THANKS FOR UNDERSTAND WHAT I'm trying to do, you been great.

I will test all this and post the result. I'll try and run install ESXi OS from USB and then create vertual PC to install FreeNAS on another USB, this will be done within ESXi.

Thanks again for your help.

 

[jgreco]

I think you missed the last portion of what I said. It won't work because you won't have anyplace to store the FreeNAS VM. Storing the FreeNAS system on a USB key isn't sufficient; ESXi requires additional files to configure the VM, and you have nowhere to store *those*. As I said, I've outlined this in much more detail in the past, including the possible variations on the idea. Short form: you need a local ESXi datastore. With an NxxL, you could use the optical bay, but it's a bit of hackery.