livegorilla
Cadet
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2016
- Messages
- 3
Hi,
I'm planning on running FreeNAS as a VM on an ESXi host, and wanted some feedback on my plan. The ESXi host is a Dell R710 with 2xL5640 CPUs, 96GB of RAM, and an H200 HBA with 2x250GB SSDs and 4x3TB hard drives.
ESXi will be installed on a USB flash drive. Since you can't create an ESXi datastore on a USB device, I'll install FreeNAS on a 250GB hard drive I have laying around. I will use a Dell H200 flashed to IT mode and passed through to the FreeNAS VM. Connected to the H200 will be 4x3TB hard drives and 2x250GB SSDs. I will have two zpools. The first will be 2 vdevs of 2 mirrored hard drives each. The second will be the 2 SSDs each in their own vdev (RAID 0). The SSD zpool will be used for fast VM storage shared via iSCSI to ESXi. A portion of the hard drive zpool will also be used for less I/O intensive VMs via iSCSI, with the rest allocated for backups, network AFP shares, etc.
1) Any issues with installing FreeNAS to a hard drive? Is mirroring the boot drive necessary or can I get away without it?
2) Is having 2 separate zpools the best way of doing this?
3) Is there a significant performance hit for using iSCSI to ESXi versus just local ESXi datastores? Would it be better to just have a local datastore on 1 large SSD for all fast VMs and just use FreeNAS for the hard drive zpool?
Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
I'm planning on running FreeNAS as a VM on an ESXi host, and wanted some feedback on my plan. The ESXi host is a Dell R710 with 2xL5640 CPUs, 96GB of RAM, and an H200 HBA with 2x250GB SSDs and 4x3TB hard drives.
ESXi will be installed on a USB flash drive. Since you can't create an ESXi datastore on a USB device, I'll install FreeNAS on a 250GB hard drive I have laying around. I will use a Dell H200 flashed to IT mode and passed through to the FreeNAS VM. Connected to the H200 will be 4x3TB hard drives and 2x250GB SSDs. I will have two zpools. The first will be 2 vdevs of 2 mirrored hard drives each. The second will be the 2 SSDs each in their own vdev (RAID 0). The SSD zpool will be used for fast VM storage shared via iSCSI to ESXi. A portion of the hard drive zpool will also be used for less I/O intensive VMs via iSCSI, with the rest allocated for backups, network AFP shares, etc.
1) Any issues with installing FreeNAS to a hard drive? Is mirroring the boot drive necessary or can I get away without it?
2) Is having 2 separate zpools the best way of doing this?
3) Is there a significant performance hit for using iSCSI to ESXi versus just local ESXi datastores? Would it be better to just have a local datastore on 1 large SSD for all fast VMs and just use FreeNAS for the hard drive zpool?
Any advice is greatly appreciated!
Thanks!