Pass SSD through to VM

[kdragon75]

http://doc.freenas.org/11/storage.html#vmware-snapshot

This is only for VMware based snapshots and has nothing to do with bhyve.

 

[sjp770]

Ok, well the 4 core trick seemed to be ok, at least it seemed a little smoother at boot. But ive got logs from blueiris showing restarts at 4:30am and 5am for no reason, then this morning I find I cant access the freenas dash or the vm.

Im going to try to approach this from a different angle.

vShpere on the m.2, pass through the disks as RDM to a freenas VM on the m.2 and I should be able to keep the data on them while I test. Then I can run a pfSense VM, a Server 2016 VM and an Ubuntu VM for plex.

Havent gotten the plex plugin to start either.. I think i'll just relegate FreeNAS to storage duties.

 

[sjp770]

So early days yet but I decided to do the above.

I grabbed 6.7 from here:
https://www.vmware.com/au/products/vsphere-hypervisor.html

Installed it on the m.2, then ran up a VM of FreeNAS 11.1 and imported the Raw Disks with the following:
https://gist.github.com/Hengjie/1520114890bebe8f805d337af4b3a064

Added my user again, set some IP's and shared out the datasets again.

So now I can just do the VMware stuff I've got training on and not learn bhyve...

 

[kdragon75]

Installed it on the m.2, then ran up a VM of FreeNAS 11.1 and imported the Raw Disks with the following:
https://gist.github.com/Hengjie/1520114890bebe8f805d337af4b3a064

Thats is a BAD idea! You don't want RDMs! That will hide the smart data from the disks and prevent FreeNAS from properly monitoring the disks. You NEED to use PCI pass through with your disk controller!

 

[kdragon75]

In 99% of cases, there is NO good reason to use RDMs. Its not faster! Abou the only good use case is if a device required non-standard SCSI calls from the guest OS that can't be translated.

 

[sjp770]

Ok, so it's not truly passing through the disks. Any pointers for the correct way to pass them through or shall I just start searching?

Thanks for the feedback

 

[kdragon75]

Do some searching, I though @Stux had a thread on the subject but I'm not seeing it. Again, what you need is PCI pass through.

 

[sjp770]

Ok, so it looks like the controller shows up as an Intel AHCI controller that does not allow passthrough. Thoughts on running it as is for a few weeks until I get a supported HBA card?

 

[kdragon75]

Ok, so it looks like the controller shows up as an Intel AHCI controller that does not allow passthrough. Thoughts on running it as is for a few weeks until I get a supported HBA card?

Depends on how much you trust the drives. You should be ok. Don't forget to setup automatic startup/shutdown orders.

 

[sjp770]

Depends on how much you trust the drives. You should be ok. Don't forget to setup automatic startup/shutdown orders.

3x2yr old WD Reds.. plus one new WD Red. All are 4Tb.

I'll get something on the way asap.

 

[sjp770]

Depends on how much you trust the drives. You should be ok. Don't forget to setup automatic startup/shutdown orders.

Got my new LSI 9211-8i HBA card installed today. Just went into maintenance mode, shut it down, added the card, booted, enabled pci passthrough on the LSI and rebooted. Went out of maintenance mode, edited the FreeNAS VM, removed the RDMs, added the pci device then booted the VM. Zero config to do on the VM - all shares worked as before.

Thanks again for the guidance.