Freenas as a hypervisor

[rwslippey]

Okay, so I don't want to visualize freenas. I know some say it can be done but I just don't want the risks with this data. I know , I know it can be done they say but I'd just rather not.

But I'm in a weird situation where I have a need (well someone I work with has the need) for storage and freenas is the perfect fit but they also have a need for a few other servers, think a linux box or 2 and a Windows server.

Is it safe to virtualize ON freenas? In a production environment. To clarify the Windows server won't really see the internet as far as hosting is concerned, it's an internal database server for a few Windows only applications. the Linux box will see the internet though.

I'm just curious if virtualization has reached maturity that others would do something like this?

The alternative is two new boxes instead of one but I'd rather be safe than sorry, at the same time, I'm not writing the checks for this either so.....

 

[sretalla]

If it's done properly, linux is a fine option to virtualize.

Windows clients are mostly OK, but not really production ready.

Windows servers are missing a key Network driver to allow VirtIO NICs to not crash the box, so forget it in production.

 

[rwslippey]

If it's done properly, linux is a fine option to virtualize.

Windows clients are mostly OK, but not really production ready.

Windows servers are missing a key Network driver to allow VirtIO NICs to not crash the box, so forget it in production.

Darn... guess we'll need to look in another direction. thanks for the insight though

 

[blanchet]

FreeNAS use bhyve(8) to virtualise guest operating systems.

• Linux and FreeBSD VMs work fine with virtio network and disks
• Windows VMs work only with virtio networks and AHCI virtual disks.

The Windows VMs issue has been fixed in FreeBSD 12.1.

Increase the VirtIO segment count to support modern Windows guests. · freebsd/freebsd-src@52426f5

The Windows virtio driver ignores the advertized seg_max field and assumes the host can accept up to 67 segments in indirect descriptors, triggering an assert in the bhyve process. This brings bac...

github.com

VMware ESXi is a more mature hypervisor for production.

 

[KevDog]

I tend to use xcp-ng as a type 1 hypervisor rather than VMware as a home user. I think VMware is free up to 50 machines whereas xcp-ng is open source and has no such limitation. Xcp-ng is the open source equivalent to Citrix. I don't believe they are produced by the same company but they share codebases with contributions from both the xcp-ng and citrix folks. It's probably apples vs oranges in reality.

Proxmox is another alternative however I didn't find this product to be as polished as either xcp-ng or VMware.

 

[Newfoundland.Republic]

VMware ESXi (the free version) has, I believe, the following limitations:

• Limit of 2 physical CPUs (sockets)
• Unlimited CPU cores
• Unlimited RAM
• Maximum of 8 vCPU per VM
• The license has no expiration date: It never expires
• The ESXi host cannot be added to the Virtual Center
• vStorage APIs are not available

I use FreeNAS' jails - and FreeNAS works fine for that purpose. Functionally, the VM implementation is not very mature based upon my experience.

I tend to try an stick to what FreeNAS is best at - storage...

 

[jgreco]

I think VMware is free up to 50 machines whereas xcp-ng is open source and has no such limitation

Even if it were true that there was a 50 VM limit, that's a hell of a lot of VM's. Maybe there was a limit way back in the day, but there isn't any on any vaguely recent ESXi product.

 

[Newfoundland.Republic]

Yep - 50 VMs is crazy high. At my day job, we do have some nodes around 50 and the issue is never really CPU power, it is RAM. Hence servers with 96 DIMM sockets and up to 12 TB of RAM...

12 TB of RAM might be a crazy good cache ;)

 

[jgreco]

Yep - 50 VMs is crazy high. At my day job, we do have some nodes around 50 and the issue is never really CPU power, it is RAM. Hence servers with 96 DIMM sockets and up to 12 TB of RAM...

12 TB of RAM might be a crazy good cache ;)

Well, I meant "a hell of a lot of VM's" in the context of someone who doesn't seem to have an investment in hypervisor technology making a decision based on faulty assumptions, and therefore probably no need for more than a handful of VM's.

Most people who've tried deploying hypervisor technology for non-trite applications recognize ESXi as *the* gold standard for compatibility with a huge number of guests, both officially supported and the even larger number of not-officially-supported ones that work great anyways. VMware made the decision to provide this technology for free back in 2008. Their pricing for vSphere is pretty high, of course, but there's a huge organization to maintain behind this.

My experience with the RAM/CPU ratio issue has generally been that there's usually a RAM shortage, except when I toss a large build out, and then of course it's the CPU that's hurting. But 256GB around here is a large hypervisor -- the low end VM's are all 256MB RAM, and it's unusual to go beyond a few GB of RAM except for special purposes like FreeNAS.

 

[Newfoundland.Republic]

@jgreco - That makes sense. We have the same experience with memory. Outside of a few outliers needing a ton of memory most use what could be considered a normal amount of RAM.