BUILD Yet another ESXi FreeNAS build

[gpsguy]

Yes, you are correct.

One can try out these features during a 60 day evaluation period.

For test purposes, one could nest ESXi on a single machine, so one could get a feel for HA & FT, without having multiple machines. It would probably be SLOW, but it is possible to do.

I believe HA / Fault tolerance are only available with the paid version of ESXi and may require vCenter and multiple nodes (someone please correct me if I'm wrong here).

 

[Dr.T]

As for LSI 2308 ESXi compatiblity, he can use M1015 for ESXi datastore and pass-through LSI 2308 to FreeNAS for ZFS pool (as far as I see at Google, FreeBSD supports LSI 2308).

Yes, you're right about FT/HA. Okay, he can fully configure FreeNAS, shutdown it and make a copy of it's folder to another datastore.
If that disk will be down, he can start that VM from another datastore /disk on Intel SATA controller - anyway all user data (ZFS) is located on the external RAID-controller, which can be reconnected to "new" VM without any problems.

 

[Dr.T]

According to SL7 manual, LSI-controller is just another PCIe device:

 

[cyberjock]

You could also do ZFS snapshots/replication...

 

[thaFaxGuy]

Here is my take:
I have been running my FreeNas for over a year now on VMware free ESXi 5.0.
It has been very stable (and for the last 5 months used as a Production server, my friend uses it for his law office).
This systems runs 24/7 and is constantly access by each users (demanding users family, my friend and his staff):D .

Here is my configuration:
- SuperMicro X8SIL-F (take advantage of the IPMI feature great for remote access/control)
- intel I3 dual core
- 16 GB ram (server quality, this is the max the motherboard will take for ECC ram, 32 for non-ecc) allocated 12 GB for the FreeNas VM and 4 for Win2008 R2
- 80 GB HardDrive , used to store VM host (4 GB) and VM machines (4 GB for FreeNas 9.1.1 and 40 GB for Win2008 R2) with room to spare.
- Adaptec SAS 3405 raid controller (with 4x500 GB WD green hard drive connected as a raid 5) - Store my main Data
- 1TB hardDrive connected to the local sata - Used for backups snap shots, FreeNas, jail etc.
- 120 GB hardDrive connected to the local sata - Used as a sandbox to store jails (Web server & ownCloud server and other experimental plugins)
- 100 GB hardDrive connected to the local sata - for VM Win2008 R2 data storage and apps.

A couple weeks ago one of my 500 hardDrive die, the only inconvience suffered was the annoying sound of the beeping raid controller.
Hot-swap the drive with a new one and was good again:D .

:( One caution, if you are planning on using the latest "free VMware release 5.5", DON'T, as you will have no way to access your host without paying for a full VM lic on one of their other products.

Also backup your VMs to an external drive or DVD (just in case).
For redundancy I backup (rsync) my FreeNas to another system remotely at my friend's office.

 

[thaFaxGuy]

just my two cents

 

[cyberjock]

rsync would never work for VMs that are actually in-use. You'd end up with a non-viable virtual disk when all is said and done because the disk would definitely get updates as the rsync process is syncing from one machine to another.

 

[jgreco]

Maybe not if the system was quiescent, but talk about just begging for pain...

 

[Dr.T]

One caution, if you are planning on using the latest "free VMware release 5.5", DON'T, as you will have no way to access your host without paying for a full VM lic on one of their other products.

Sorry, my English is far from perfect, what do you mean?
I installed ESXi 5.5 with free given 1-CPU key and host is fully accessible (by other computers and Client for management).

 

[jgreco]

ESXi is moving towards web browser based management, and all the management stuff for that is part of vCenter. The legacy client does not offer the ability to manage/edit vmx-10 based VM's. Heavily discussed elsewhere.

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/458054

 

[Sir.Robin]

Yeah, but with vSphere ESXi 5.5 you can still access your host as normal with vSphere client.

What you can't do, is edit the hardware config of a VM that has hardware version higher than 8. Stupid, but just make your VM's version 8 and you're fine.

For now at least.

 

[MrMadMan]

Wow. Thanks for all your replies! It's really invaluable.

So running ESXi 5.5 but sticking with hardware version 8 should be safe if I understand you correctly (I'll read that thread that jgreco posted)

And regarding backup, shutting down a VM prior to major changes to back it up is something I can live with.

 

[thaFaxGuy]

rsync would never work for VMs that are actually in-use. You'd end up with a non-viable virtual disk when all is said and done because the disk would definitely get updates as the rsync process is syncing from one machine to another.

Not true, I rsync the Data on my VM FreeNas to a remote site for safe keep. Note, I am not coping the VM guest, just the data on the guest.
As for the vm guest, I make a copy of the guest once initially setup, that way I can restore it if my vm host went down or if I wanted to transfer to another vm host.
Here I don't have to rebuild my vm guests from scratch.

I should have clarify what I said about vSphere 5.5. But what

Sir.Robin

stated is what I meant.
Note there are some limitations with hardware version 8 vs version 10. One thing to consider (for large scale application NAS) is:

Support for 62TB VMDK
VMware is increasing the maximum size of a virtual machine disk file (VMDK) in vSphere 5.5. The previous limit
was 2TB—512 bytes. The new limit is 62TB. The maximum size of a virtual Raw Device Mapping (RDM) is also
increasing, from 2TB—512 bytes to 62TB. Virtual machine snapshots also support this new size for delta disks
that are created when a snapshot is taken of the virtual machine.

This new size meets the scalability requirements of all application types running in virtual machines.

see http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-Platform-Whats-New.pdf

 

[KMR]

It should probably be noted that most FreeNAS VMs will be very small (less than 10GB) so the VMDK size limit is of no import here. If you are trying to build a FreeNAS VM by passing VMDKs on individual disks to the VM or using RDM you are asking for trouble. These points are covered in more detail on other posts on the forum. Be careful!

 

[MrMadMan]

It should probably be noted that most FreeNAS VMs will be very small (less than 10GB) so the VMDK size limit is of no import here. If you are trying to build a FreeNAS VM by passing VMDKs on individual disks to the VM or using RDM you are asking for trouble. These points are covered in more detail on other posts on the forum. Be careful!

I'm well well aware of that, but thanks for mentioning it anyway.

I'm gonna be using VT-d to pass controllers to the FreeNAS VM, thereby "isolating" them from the host and other clients.

 

[KMR]

Sorry, that comment wasn't directed at you. You seem to be doing your research pretty well. I just wanted to put that out there because of thaFaxGuy's comments in case anyone skimming through got the wrong idea.