VMs and FreeNAS?

[madtulip]

Hey guys.

My AsRock C2750D4I just died again. Both i had lived about 5 month. VGA showing nothing anymore, IPMI comes alive though. In the end the board was a bad recommendation for me. So for this time with a little bit experience with my first FreeNAS im thinking about returning that faulty mobo and upgrade to a Xeon E3-1220 or 1240 V3.

I noticed with the old system, that i could use a debian or maybe windows for steam game servers as well as some other windows 10 VMs for RDP sessions. Other people in my household mainly browse, use youtube, and office applications (no GPU acceleration requirements) on theire laptops - id like to RDP those to a faster machine as theire laptops grow old.

So do i need to install FreeNAS on the bare metal in order for the ZFS to work "save"TM and correctly or is there some VM layer i could install between? I was triing out to install debian and windows on the jails created by FreeNAS using the VM type jail (?, not the native FreeNAS jails anyway) but noticed quite some performance drops. At least on the AsRock C2750D4I performance for some simple tasks like a debian with just steam and a dont starve dedicated server for ~4 people would be laggy - fiddled around with fixed hardware assignment for a while to no avail.
So now im not sure if i should search for a lower level VM software and install FreeNAS on that in parallel to the other VMs i described above. FreeNas jail architecture is nice for a single webserver but doesnt seem to do so good performance wise if you want other jails then FreeBSD based ones. Is that possible? Do you have any experience with VM managing software that can be recommented, or do i need to buy a second box, one for FreeNas and one for Nodes/computational tasks? Depending on that im thinking how to scale the CPU for the new mobo im about to buy.

Thank you very much for your time and advice and have a nice weekend!

 

[Magius]

I hesitate to even reply as I'm fairly new around here and FreeNAS virtualization is a fairly volatile topic, but hey, I'm planning a FreeNAS-on-ESXi build myself, and I believe if you do it "smart", you'll be perfectly OK. Unfortunately, I also believe the old-timers around here are generally correct when they say "if you need to ask for help with virtualizing FreeNAS, you should *not* be virtualizing FreeNAS". Without further ado, here are the essential resources that you'll want to read, and re-read, and really understand what you're getting into.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...nas-in-production-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ative-for-those-seeking-virtualization.26095/
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/

Once you've really digested all of that, if you're still interested in pursuing FreeNAS in a VM, I'd recommend searching for relevant build threads. The terms "ESXi and FreeNAS" should be a great start. There are some really good threads, but if you're able to handle the extra power consumption, you may be better served by building a dedicated FreeNAS machine and a separate machine for VM hosting.

 

[m0nkey_]

I also believe the old-timers around here are generally correct when they say "if you need to ask for help with virtualizing FreeNAS, you should *not* be virtualizing FreeNAS"

This couldn't be closer to the truth.

 

[Spearfoot]

@Magius and @m0nkey_ are right; you can virtualize FreeNAS and it will work very well... but to be successful you have to use appropriate hardware and understand what you're doing. It's not a trivial undertaking...

VMware's ESXi is the only hypervisor system I've ever heard of anyone using. You can register with VMware and obtain a free license key allowing you to use the software on a single-CPU system.

VT-d passthrough of disk controllers to the FreeNAS VM is absolutely essential. This usually means either purchasing a system with a built-in LSI HBA (like the Supermicro X10SL7 which I use in one of my servers), or using an HBA card (such as an LSI-9211/IBM M1015/Dell H200). In either case, these are easily passed through to the FreeNAS VM. It may be possible to pass a motherboard's SATA controller, but I have never tried this myself.

Here are a couple of links to articles by forum members have written about this subject:

• @Benjamin Bryan : "FreeNAS 9.10 on VMware ESXi 6.0 Guide"
  
• @joeschmuck : "My Dream System (I think)"

If none of this makes any sense... do some deep study before proceeding!

Good luck!