performance with freenas on Xenserver.

[raymondcidad]

Hi guys,
I've been using freenas for a couple of years now on a pen drive. Loving it off course.
Stable, fast, reliable. everything.

Now, my question is,
how reliable is freenas virtualized for a small production enviroment?
let's say for 2-4 users with no high volume of transfers...
we need to run another OS running and can afford two servers.

thanks!

 

[cyberjock]

Please do not run FreeNAS in production as a Virtual Machine!

Absolutely must virtualize FreeNAS! ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

Both of those will provide you with enough information to figure out if you want to make that jump. Both of those are the products of lots of people that have lost everything with no chance of recovery. If you follow every rule in those guides you may still lose your data. It's much riskier than running on bare metal. If this is a business you'd better be doing backups before you consider virtualizing at all. If you aren't making complete and thorough backups at regular intervals I wouldn't recommend you even think about virtualizing.

Virtualizing FreeNAS is one of those things that works when it works and it works well. But of something happens like a failed disk(despite having redundancy in the zpool) or ESXi failure, you may be kissing your data goodbye. Often a small thing gets out of control and suddenly you have no chance of recovering your data.

 

[raymondcidad]

Thanks CJ,
I figure...

It seems too risky for sure.

I thought it maybe a little bit slower, not that stable for more than 10 users, but with those post, I realize it is worse idea than I thought.

Thanks for the reply.

The profesional thing to do is say "no no"

 

[cyberjock]

Exactly. :)

I think you made a very smart choice. I'd wager that more than 99% of FreeNAS users don't know how to properly implement FreeNAS in a VM. You probably fall in that category. I did until I got alot of one-on-one help from one of our moderators. Even now I have some reservations about my choice to use ESXi and I'll be getting rid of ESXi as soon as Plex works in a jail.