This took me ages to figure out, but it's actually quite simple to do.
This assumes you want RAIDZ1 and have three physical drives for the virtual disks that FreeNAS will use. This also assumes you already have VMWare ESXi set up and running.
Cheers,
Tim.
Caveat: for a production environment I wouldn't put my balls on the line by doing it this way, but in a production environment you wouldn't need to; you'd have resources for additional hardware. However, for a test-environment/study/home environment, or a 'just to see' it appears to work great.
This assumes you want RAIDZ1 and have three physical drives for the virtual disks that FreeNAS will use. This also assumes you already have VMWare ESXi set up and running.
- Create three datastores in ESXi, one for each of three three separate physical disks you have installed in your NAS box
- Follow instructions in FreeNAS manual to get the VM up and running...
- Create a 4GB VM
- Edit the VM settings and add 3 virtual disks of 100GB, put one on each of the 3 datastores.
- Boot VM from FreeNAS ISO and install on the 4GB VM (may appear like it's the ESXi flash drive on the server it's found (if you're running ESXi off a flash drive like I do), but it's not)
- Once installed and rebooted the disks should be available in the FreeNAS GUI.
- Volumes > Volume Manager
- Add the three disks and select the ZFS RAIDZ options
- Set the permissions: leave at Unix ACL, and tick all the Read/write/Execute options (yes, not good for security, but this is for testing)
- Windows (CIFS) Shares
- Add Windows (CIFS) Share
- Path: choose the volume created above
- Allow guest access
Cheers,
Tim.
Caveat: for a production environment I wouldn't put my balls on the line by doing it this way, but in a production environment you wouldn't need to; you'd have resources for additional hardware. However, for a test-environment/study/home environment, or a 'just to see' it appears to work great.