Trial FreeNAS Virtual Installation on Hyper-V Server 2016

[Cocksy]

Evening All,

I'm new to FreeNAS and I'm looking to set up small temporary trial installation in a VM just to test it out on my home server. This is purely for testing so I can play with the O/S and start to learn it - I'm planning on creating a few 1GB virtual disks for the FreeNAS VM just to play around a bit. There will be no essential data, and very little data in total (probably some pictures, files, and videos), just to test it all out.

My server is a TS-140 running Hyper-V Server 2016 with 16GB ECC RAM, and my question is: are there any particular settings / tweaks I need to do to the VM or the hypervisor to get it working well enough with FreeNAS to trial it out?

I've read through a lot of the forum and know that Hyper-V isn't necessarily the best hypervisor for FreeNAS (and that virtualizing FreeNAS isn't great unless you can pass-through an HBA), but it's what I'm currently running at home on my server. My hyper-v server has a WHS 2011 VM in it, which I'm hoping to migrate the data to FreeNAS if I can get to grips with it, as well as a couple of windows 10 VMs that I use for messing around in.

Grateful for any tips / pointers! TIA.

 

[kdragon75]

If you plan to play with bhyve take a look at the following article. It details how to enable virtualization within a hyper-v guest.

Give the VM at least 8GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores. Other than that, have fun.

 

[Cocksy]

If you plan to play with bhyve take a look at the following article. It details how to enable virtualization within a hyper-v guest.

Give the VM at least 8GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores. Other than that, have fun.

Thanks - I need to work out how to migrate my current VMs from hyper-v to bhyve in due course... Not really even looked into that yet!

I've set up my trial FreeNAS in a VM on hyper-v server 2016 with the normal settings and it seems working ok for now.

Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk

 

[kdragon75]

Thanks - I need to work out how to migrate my current VMs from hyper-v to bhyve in due course... Not really even looked into that yet!

bhyve may have a tool to convert the VM config file but generally you just dump the vhd into a new bhyve VM. Most modern OSes are fine with this, just be sure to copy the NIC MACs over to the new VM.

 

[Cocksy]

Cheers - I'll give that a shot when I'm set up then!