SOLVED Volume creation issues in 11.1

[elangley]

Hello All,

In FreeNAS 11.1 I am attempting to create zpools/volumes on two identical systems that are running in VMware. They both exhibit that same symptoms. Here's the setup.

1 - 100 GB SSD disk configured as a ZIL
2 - 5 TB spinning disks configure as mirrors

Once I set these up in the Volume Manager and click Create Volume the status bar just keeps going and the zpool/volume is not created.

If close out the status bar the Volumes screen just says "Loading..."

I have about six FreeNAS systems (mostly 9.10.2U6) configured similarly, this is the only one with a volume creation issue.

What can I look for to troubleshoot?

~eric

 

[dlavigne]

Anything in /var/log/messages?

 

[elangley]

Anything in /var/log/messages?

This is resolved. The spinning disks cannot be configured as Thin, they must be Thick.

 

[Nick2253]

The spinning disks cannot be configured as Thin, they must be Thick.

This implies that you are creating virtual disks on top of physical disks in VMware and providing these virtual disks to FreeNAS. You should be using hardware passthrough to pass the controller from VMware directly into FreeNAS so it can directly work with the disks.

 

[elangley]

This implies that you are creating virtual disks on top of physical disks in VMware and providing these virtual disks to FreeNAS. You should be using hardware passthrough to pass the controller from VMware directly into FreeNAS so it can directly work with the disks.

Thank you Nick, yes that would be ideal. I have tried that in the past and ran into issues with all devices having to be set to passthrough and thus being unable to create datastores or some other issue as I recall.

I'll try again in my lab to see if I can get it to work.

~eric

 

[Nick2253]

I'm not sure what you mean by "all devices". If you mean "all hard drives", that could be correct, in the sense that you cannot pass individual hard drives through to a VM. You instead have to pass an entire controller over. However, you should have no problem with multiple controllers in your server, and only passing one controller through to the FreeNAS VM.

 

[elangley]

I'm not sure what you mean by "all devices". If you mean "all hard drives", that could be correct, in the sense that you cannot pass individual hard drives through to a VM. You instead have to pass an entire controller over. However, you should have no problem with multiple controllers in your server, and only passing one controller through to the FreeNAS VM.

Yes, that was the issue. So I couldn't use any drives to store local vmware datastores which makes it trickier to manage. If I put in another controller I suppose that would resolve that issue.

Thanks again.

~eric