pass-through of hard disks

[bitsquirrel]

Hello all!

I'm a relatively new (1 year) user of FreeNAS and I am very very happy with many things about it.

One thing I'm unclear on, is where the official support fora are. Is this it? I suppose I was expecting a mailing list and/or IRC channel. Not complaining, just surprised.

Okay back to the real issues. I'm struggling a little with bhyve. I don't quite understand it. Used to VMWare, Virtualbox, but not this weird thing where I have to register the ISO and disk images. Anyone got a suggested reference?

Specifically, one of hte things I wanted to do was, pass a USB-attached disk through to a Linux VM, so that I can use cryptsetup to decrypt it, and maybe LVM (if I had used LVM underneath the crypto). I can't figure out how to do that natively, and I can't figure out how to do it remotely, so I need to pass the USB device through to the Linux guest and have it deal with it natively. Right?

 

[nightshade00013]

Nope, FreeNAS does not have things setup for passthrough. You could potentially enable it but then you will have to do it all with the command line. Check out the FreeBSD documentation for all of that. However you will be potentially risking system stability. You COULD however do this by creating a Zvol on a USB device and then attaching it to the VM but honestly I would see that as a major pain. It would be easier to just create a small Zvol and attach it to the VM and base it off the HDD. You could easily snapshot it and back it up. Plus if you are encrypting the system with a USB drive it needs to be attached to work. If you didn't want the VM to boot you just detach the Zvol and reattach it again later.

As far as support there is an IRC but most everything is handled though here.