Second build & I finally signed up for the Forum

[Xonb]

Long time reader and first time poster. I built one system for a family member in mid-2015 for mostly home file and media serving which went off without a hitch (mostly). That went so well - in fact - that I'm now embarking on a NAS to call my own with the hopes of setting up some virtual environments in addition to all the goodness FreeNAS has baked in - still working through how to best handle the virtual environments. Anyone have a good setup for running virtual machines that they would recommend? I see that FreeNAS 10 should have bhyve but can't bring myself to wait that long.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Welcome!

Anyone have a good setup for running virtual machines that they would recommend?

The VirtualBox jail is working fine for my needs, which amount to a small number of lightly utilized Ubuntu Server VMs. Make sure you check the box for host I/O caching in the settings for the virtual SATA controller.

 

[Xonb]

Welcome!

The VirtualBox jail is working fine for my needs, which amount to a small number of lightly utilized Ubuntu Server VMs. Make sure you check the box for host I/O caching in the settings for the virtual SATA controller.

Thanks Robert! It looks like that will work. I'm a little skeptical about VirtualBox but probably just owing to greater familiarity with VMware and Hyper-V. I'm playing with FreeNAS in ESXi right now but I will probably wipe everything out and run on bare metal if if VirtualBox jail works as advertised.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I'm playing with FreeNAS in ESXi right now but I will probably wipe everything out and run on bare metal if if VirtualBox jail works as advertised.

Virtualizing FreeNAS is something you can do if you're a virtualization guru. For the rest of us, the VirtualBox jail is the current solution. FreeNAS 10 looks set to be a better solution, but for now nobody should be running that in anything other than a test environment.