Recommendation Requested

[ChrisNAS]

Hi there.

So I'm putting together a system with the goal of running FN along with others as vms on esxi.

I've installed an lsi 9211-8i card which I've flashed to IT mode. Currently, two spinning drives are connected to the lsi card which will be passed through to FN. I think that is good to go.

I also have two identical ssds for the esxi install and vm storage which are connected to the mb ports. I was originally planning on using one ssd to install esxi on and maybe the FN vm, and using the other ssd for all other vms. However, I'd like to have some protection against an ssd failure. I thought it may be a good idea to raid 1 the ssds and put esxi and vms on that, but I'd have to (I think) use the mb raid feature to do that which of course is a bad idea in general.

What would you do with this setup to have a safety against an ssd failure? Is there an automatic solution here without having to manually backup esxi/vms every so often?

I appreciate your input :)

Thank you

 

[tvsjr]

Unless you have a fairly small subset of motherboard that has a "real" RAID controller on it, you have HostRAID - AKA FakeRAID. Which VMware won't even utilize. It'll just see the two drives.

If I were doing this (and I wouldn't... storing VMs within a VM running on the system is klugey in my book), I'd put the SSDs on the 9211, pass them through to FN, mirror them, and store all your other VMs there. Then, I would install a single SSD on a motherboard port that would boot ESXi and would store your FreeNAS VM. In the event of an SSD failure, reconstituting ESXi and FreeNAS is simple... just make sure you're backing up the FreeNAS configuration file somewhere (that isn't on this system) routinely.

 

[ChrisNAS]

Thanks for your input. I've read others doing that with VMs and having to play with timing of booting. Rather not go that route. I guess I was hoping to hear that I could use a dataset on FN and the spinning disks to auto backup the data from the esxi and vm ssds periodically.

I'm trying to also find out if once the lsi card is flashed to IT if I can still do raid through that for the SSDs, and if so, would that be doable for esxi...?

 

[tvsjr]

No, once the card is flashed to IT mode, it becomes an HBA - nothing more. You would need two cards - one for ESXi natively, and one passed through to FN in IT mode. Check the ESXi hardware compatibility list to ensure you choose a RAID controller that ESXi likes.