Assistance with best practice setup

[Shankage]

Hi all

I am currently building a host with Freenas and esx on the same box, as I have limited gear.

Hardware I have is:
- dell r710 6 drive bays
- 96gb memory
- 4 sas 600gb and 2 250gb ssds
- Lsi hba
- flash drives

I've been struggling with how exactly to set this up.

Currently I have:

- esx booting off a flash drive
- mounted a USB stick and created a data store
- create Freenas vm using the USB stick data store as it's mount
- install Freenas onto the vm using above data store
- passthrough all ssds and hdds attached to the hba to the Freenas vm

I would like to move to a production once I have a decent handle on all this.

Thoughts?

Cheers

 

[BigDave]

I would not use a flash device to run ESXi or FreeNAS, but that's just me.
If your intention is to run FreeNAS in a VM for production, you need much
more that "a decent handle". You need to become an ESXi NINJA!
Check out @joeschmuck's thread detailing his experience with ESXi.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/my-dream-system-i-think.41072/

 

[Shankage]

Thanks for the tip, but the reason I have them both running on flash drives is because I want to keep the bays for zpool.

There are on board Sata connectors but no power for them.

I'll definitely check out that post thanks!

 

[Shankage]

When people say you shouldn't virtualise Freenas unless it is properly configured, are they referring to this?

http://www.freenas.org/blog/yes-you-can-virtualize-freenas/

 

[gpsguy]

There are several threads on the forums on how to do it correctly.

What we're trying to prevent are scenarios like this (posted yesterday) - https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...after-power-loss-need-help.55538/#post-387880

When people say you shouldn't virtualise Freenas unless it is properly configured

 

[Shankage]

Alright so I'm one up with using the hba and passthrough!