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FreeNAS on ESXi, pci passthrough versus RDM's/VMDK's

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  • 27-11-2013 2:53pm
    #1
    BigEejit
    Registered Users Posts: 3,739 ✭✭✭


    I am in the process of building a home server to handle a few jobs including a Ubuntu LAMP server, NAS and a windows 7 machine.

    I notice that the FreeNAS wiki/forums/website says do not virtualise your FreeNAS server, but if you read the forums plenty of people are doing it, mostly using VMDK's or RDM's, but I really want to use PCI passthrough.

    So my question is: Anyone here virtualizing their FreeNAS run into problems? Particularly want to hear of problems with RDM's and VMDK's because if you properly screw up your ESXi server you are going to be rebuilding the server to get at your data.
    Do you have a SAS/SCSI adapter or SATA?. In my case, I have a dell perc 5i with 4 x 2TB WD red's and want/need to get pci passthrough going on it so if ESXi goes south I can just plug in a usb stick with FreeNAS on it and boot off it to recover. I would be using raidz1, so i need to get health reporting working in esxi for my perc 5i

    I am going to get FreeNAS running off a small datastore, I just have to make sure it is backed up often/daily.


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    #2
    BigEejit
    Registered Users Posts: 3,739 ✭✭✭BigEejit


    Well ... it turns out that I need a perc 6i because the 5i has problems with passthrough .... and I found to support pci passthrough I need a cpu/motherboard that supports IOMMU/VT-d (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IOMMU-supporting_hardware). Unfortunately my mobo/cpu does not support pci-passthrough so I will have to try and get virtualbox working on FreeNAS :eek:....


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    #3
    swampgas
    Registered Users Posts: 3,535 ✭✭✭swampgas


    Why not just create the FreeNAS server as a regular VM based off a VMFS volume, and back up whatever critical files you can't afford to lose? Using pass-through this way seems a bit like overkill to me.


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    #4
    BigEejit
    Registered Users Posts: 3,739 ✭✭✭BigEejit


    swampgas wrote: »
    Why not just create the FreeNAS server as a regular VM based off a VMFS volume, and back up whatever critical files you can't afford to lose? Using pass-through this way seems a bit like overkill to me.

    http://forums.freenas.org/threads/please-do-not-run-freenas-in-production-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/


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    #5
    swampgas
    Registered Users Posts: 3,535 ✭✭✭swampgas


    Read the link. I wouldn't be worried. I'd suggest avoiding the temptation to over-complicate things.

    Unless you're planning for enterprise-level production levels of performance I don't see a problem running it off a vmdk file. I regularly run various filer-type VMs such as OpenFiler, UberCellera, for test and training purposes and it's a doddle. If this is a home server as you say, just set up FreeNAS as a VM and see if its performance is adequate. You'll also have the option of adding more vmdks or growing the vmdks, and will be able to take snapshots and so on.

    And if you want to back up your FreeNAS VM, you just copy the VM files off the ESXi onto an external disk.


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    #6
    vibe666
    Registered Users Posts: 13,016 ✭✭✭✭vibe666


    they do warn you not to use it in a VM, bit I did it myself and I only really had 2 issues, but I don't know if one of them was to do with it being a VM or just dodgy drives.

    i used RDM's on 8x 2tb samsung spinpoints, but it turns out there was a firmware bug that may or may not have been present on some or all of the drives. every so often, it would basically crap it's ants and need a hard reset. i never did try the firmware update as most of the data was movies and tv shows etc. that wasn't backed up. it wasn't critical, but i didn't want to lose it all the same, so i just made do with rebooting it periodically to avoid the issue.

    the other problem was that I was using RAID6 on ZFS and it turns out, once you get into that kind of size of volumes you basically need 1gb of RAM per 1TB of storage to avoid performance issues, which I didn't have (the ESXi box only had 8gb in total), so performance wasn't great.

    other than that it was grand in general and did me for a couple of years, but it bugged me that everything was so counter intuitive (for a windows guy) and I eventually got a synology NAS and I'm delighted with it and won't be going back.


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    #7
    BigEejit
    Registered Users Posts: 3,739 ✭✭✭BigEejit


    I found another problem with FreeNAS. I found one day that I could not get to any shares and could not get to the management page. The NAS was working just not sharing or talking to anyone. Rebooted it, same. ...so after some research I found that it happens often enough that a lot of people knew that i had to set it back to defaults and then reimport the volumes and set up the users and shares again. No data loss, but it was unavailable and a real pain in the arse.

    And after 3 weeks it happened again.

    I backed up and blew it away.... back to WHS 2011 again.


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