Configuration Design Suggestions with FreeNAS on a VM

[hpnas]

My server specs:

6 x 2 TB drives
2 x 500 GB drives
1 x 128 SSD drives
2 x 64 SSD drives
32 GB RAM
AMD 6 core processor
VMware ESXi 5

Since I don't have a NAS in this environment I need a converged design with the compute and storage on the same node.

My first idea at this was to do a hardware RAID 1 of the 500 GB drives and install ESXi on them and create a FreeNAS VM with 8 GB of RAM and 2 vCPU.

I would present the 6 x 2 TB drives to FreeNAS as RDMs and do a RAIDz1. Then export a NFS share as the datastore for ESXi.

My questions to you experts:

1. Would you suggest using the SSDs for caching (e.g. L2ARC)? or does the fact I am running FreeNAS in a VM with RDMs negate any performance benefits?
2. Does my RAM and CPU allocation look sufficient?
3. Does FreeNAS support VAAI with NFS?
4. Should I use iSCSI instead of NFS?
5. Is there anything else I should change or not considering?

 

[cyberjock]

Do you want to lose your data?

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/p...duction-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/#post58364

then read...

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/a...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/

Yes, both of those titles are appropriate, and you are chosing to use RDM, which that second link explains shouldn't be done if you value your data.