Best approach for FreeNAS on ESX?

[LSmith4285]

Hello

I have a HP Microserver which I have loaded ESXi onto to see how it runs etc. What I am looking to do is set up FreeNAS on it as well, ideally what I want is 3 VM's in the end. One for FreeNAS and a few Windows XP boxes to do various jobs with very little load.

My question is how am I best to set this up? I am concerned that if I run ESXi with FreeNAS as a VM I am unable to do file level recoveries if I have problems with the disk. I am planning RAID1 but I would still like to be able to plug the disk into my PC and quickly copy off the files I need if the disk is on it's way out.

Do you have any recommendations? Is this even possible? I've read through a lot recently about this but I'm still not sure.

Any advice would be greatly received.

Thanks
Lyle

 

[campbela]

This doesnt exactly answer your question but I am planning on doing something similar but I have decided to put FreeNAS on its own HP Microserver with a second HP Microserver running ESXi with a couple of W2003 instances (Domain controller and Exchange server). I decided that having FreeNAS NOT running as a vmware instance would keep things much simpler, especially as I am more of a Windows man than BSD.
Also, bear in mind that your ability to pull out the disk and quickly copy files off will depend on a number of things like what you are using as a desktop OS and what file system you choose to use.

 

[louisk]

Virutalizing storage is not a good idea. Storage is already the biggest bottleneck in a computing environment (whether it's a phone, tablet, laptop, server, SAN). Virtualizing it simply makes it slower.

I would suggest (as Campbela has) that you run your storage on a separate box and virtualize other systems.