Alternative to FreeNAS? ESXi, linux, FreeBSD?

[Pehpe]

You need a second computer to administer / use VMs. For windows, I usually enable rdp in the VM.

OK! Thx! I only want to avoid to run a second energy consuming server. I only want to use a normal Desktop PC, which i can turn on and off every time and can use the VMs on the NAS. Windows Server 2012 sounds cool. Then it shouldn't be a problem to use Debian or Linux Mint on it.

 

[RichTJ99]

Do most people use the windows VMs as their main desktop PCs? Using a standard computer as a thin client?

 

[pirateghost]

Do most people use the windows VMs as their main desktop PCs? Using a standard computer as a thin client?

Running from Virtualbox? Hell no.

At work we deploy hundreds of thin clients and run VDI on top of Hyper-V. This works well, as does running similar on proper hypervisors, but VBox is not going to be good for that. For a proper VDI you want some GPU acceleration if possible, which means (remoteFX on Hyper-V, or proper 3D support in ESXi). VBox on headless offers neither.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Do most people use the windows VMs as their main desktop PCs?

Hell no, I use a Mac mini. When I have to run Windows, I generally use VirtualBox inside OS X.

 

[RichTJ99]

I think I need to do more reading on the ESXi & thin clients. It sounds like Virtualbox is really just a desktop running on another desktop.

ESXi (or Hyper-V) with a thin client combines resources of server & local pc? That is how you can have a VM running on an ESXi server & still have good performance to the point that a user might not know they are on a VM?

 

[pirateghost]

I think I need to do more reading on the ESXi & thin clients. It sounds like Virtualbox is really just a desktop running on another desktop.

ESXi (or Hyper-V) with a thin client combines resources of server & local pc? That is how you can have a VM running on an ESXi server & still have good performance to the point that a user might not know they are on a VM?

A vdi setup (thin client connecting to a VM) is nothing more than a machine connecting to a remote desktop session. There is nothing combined about it. It isn't combining the local and virtual anything. It is merely remoting into a desktop running in a virtual machine. All the processing power is done on the servers.

 

[jgreco]

It's vaguely more complex than what @pirateghost suggests, since they usually seem to use proprietary protocols that allow manipulation of local devices. But that's the idea.

 

[pirateghost]

It's vaguely more complex than what @pirateghost suggests, since they usually seem to use proprietary protocols that allow manipulation of local devices. But that's the idea.

My version is simplified greatly. Lol.

 

[RichTJ99]

In an office environment, the user boots the local PC, then clients an icon to RDP (or other method) into the VM? I was looking at thin clients on Dell & why wouldnt all companies/people get the cheapest 'appliance' they can find to connect? It seems like they have different Ram options, etc.

 

[pirateghost]

In an office environment, the user boots the local PC, then clients an icon to RDP (or other method) into the VM? I was looking at thin clients on Dell & why wouldnt all companies/people get the cheapest 'appliance' they can find to connect? It seems like they have different Ram options, etc.

Some thin clients run embedded windows/linux/etc. Some run a proprietary thin OS that does nothing but connect to a remote session after booting.

 

[jgreco]

In an office environment, the user boots the local PC, then clients an icon to RDP (or other method) into the VM? I was looking at thin clients on Dell & why wouldnt all companies/people get the cheapest 'appliance' they can find to connect? It seems like they have different Ram options, etc.

You still need local resources for processing, backing store, and presentation.

As an interesting and relevant historical perspective, about twenty years ago I designed what @pirateghost would recognize as a thin client for UNIX - a FreeBSD-based X-terminal. It did something marvelous and remarkable at the time, which was that it booted off a 1.44MB floppy disk, and then ran an Xserver which then connected via xdm over the network. The neat thing about this was that it'd run on 486 boxes that were being tossed out as "too slow for Microsoft Windows" but the bad thing was that if it had insufficient RAM, it'd crash (no swap space). So the big important trick we figured was to rip 16MB out of one machine, discard it, and then add the 16MB to the next machine, giving us a 32MB Xterminal. Since everything was switching from FPM to EDO RAM around that time, no one wanted the RAM for anything else.

For bonus points, I get to point out that my Xterminal design was the foundation for PicoBSD, which was the first general purpose appliance-ified version of FreeBSD. That was the inspiration for NanoBSD, which powers fine projects such as pfSense and FreeNAS to this day.

 

[RichTJ99]

Does Esxi have a raidz / ZFS style file system?

I have one of my camera servers running virtually on freenas (testing) & it seems to work OK but looks like it is hitting the freenas box bad.

Is this using to many resources for the network, cpu, and disk?

 

[pirateghost]

No. Esxi does not use zfs

 

[danb35]

But Proxmox does.

 

[depasseg]

Is this using to many resources for the network, cpu, and disk?

It doesn't look bad to me.

 

[jgreco]

Does Esxi have a raidz / ZFS style file system?

No, ESXi requires a cluster-aware filesystem, and uses its own design, VMFS.

 

[RichTJ99]

So when using freenas as the datastore (is that in a mirrored stripe?) does Vmware format the ZFS shared filesystem?

 

[pirateghost]

So when using freenas as the datastore (is that in a mirrored stripe?) does Vmware format the ZFS shared filesystem?

If you're using iSCSI esxi will format it to its own filesystem on top of zfs.

If it's NFS share, then esxi just puts files on your freenas box. It doesn't touch the actual filesystem

 

[RichTJ99]

What is the preferred method for Esxi? Will the VMware snapshots in Freenas work with either iSCSI or NFS?

Could I 'share' the iSCSI data on the freenas to backup the VMDK files?

 

[pirateghost]

You probably should do some reading on what iSCSI is.