Virtualised FreeNAS with MPIO - will it work?

[Shankage]

Hi,

I am converting an R510 12 bay into storage for my environment, below is my plan of attack and was wondering if anyone could verify or tell me why it won't work?

1) Install ESXi ont a usb device using an internal header
2) Passthrough another USB stick and create a datastore to put the FreeNAS VM onto (if I cannot utilise one of the sata ports due to have lack of sata power)
3) Passthrough the HBA to the FreeNAS VM, configuring the VM with adequate h/w and 'best practices'
4) Install FreeNAS, configure pools and present the iSCSI storage and NFS pools, VM will have 1 vmnic to start with
5) Configure the localhost to see the datastore and install vCenter on onto it.
7) Create a vDS and create a port group for the iSCSI vmnic, prior to this create a second vmnic on the VM for the second iSCSI port, when adding the host to the vDS bind each iSCSI port to it's own physical nic
8) use a 3rd nic for the NFS volume and do the same
9) configure other esx hosts for mpio

Does this seem like it will work or is there a better way to do this?

Thanks

 

[Johev]

Hi @Shankage,

I am not sure if this will help as I have been toying with a very similar thought, however every time I ask about it I get the same type of reply.

Apparently booting ESXi from an USB and passing though another USB to a FreeNAS VM in order to boot it, is complicated. What people suggested was to use an old SATA drive or a SATA DOM to boot FreeNAS from.

Unfortunately I did not try it out yet, therefore this is only feedback I got from people when I asked this type of a question. (not fully true, some just point me to an ESXi forum and say it's not a type of question to have here :))

I invite anyone who has done this or tried it to provide further feedback, as this would give us the possibility to reserve all SATA ports on the MB for storage HDDs.

 

[Evertb1]

I invite anyone who has done this or tried it to provide further feedback, as this would give us the possibility to reserve all SATA ports on the MB for storage HDDs.

Creating VM's on ESXi is a fairly uncomplicated thing if you reserve a SATA drive (spinning disk or SSD or whatever) as storage for your VM's. Making things complicated just to save some SATA ports sounds not sensible. If you look around on ebay you could find a good working second hand HBA for not much money (I bought 2 Dell Perc H310's for 35 euro each). Flash it to IT mode and you are in busines with 8 SATA ports for your FreeNAS vm (if you buy some breakout cables as well). I have FreeNAS running on ESXi. ESXi itself boots from a small SSD connected to my onboard SATA controller. I created the VM's on a bigger SSD also connected to my onboard SATA controller. I have one of the Dell HBA's passed trough to the FreeNAS VM so it has full control over the disks connected to the HBA.

By the way: you should be aware that running FreeNAS virtualized needs some extra meassures to do it right. Several forum members have done this wit good results. @Stux has written a good build report of his ESXi server. You can find it here. It's lenghty but it covers a lot. You just need to pick out the things for your specific situation.

 

[Shankage]

It is pretty simple to boot esxi off USB and passthrough another to create a datastore to store the FreeNAS vm. I have already done it for this built and ended up using an external HDD for this purpose.

I'm unable to add another hba as suggested as I can't get anymore power to the drives, I have bought pcie nvme hdds that Im waiting on and will transfer the data store too.

Thanks for the link for the virtualised FreeNAS, I think I'm good with the virtualising of it, was a little curious about the mpio side but pretty sure my solution will work!

Thanks :)