ESXi build - Am I doing it right?

[Pitfrr]

Hi,

I could set up a HP DL380 G6 with following hardware:
- CPU: 2x Xeon X5560
- 176GB of RAM
- Dell PERC H200 controller flashed to LSI 9211-8i
- 3x 120GB hard disks on the integrated P410i controller
- 2x 1TB hard disks on the H200 controller

And I wanted to install VMware and virtualise FreeNAS (aside with other VMs).
I don't have much experience with VMware and virtualisation (it's a good exercice!) so I did some careful reading on the forum and I would like to have some feedback to know if I did something wrong or not...

For now it's only for testing purposes, to get use to it and experiment around so no important data is stored in FreeNAS.

Here is what I did:
- VMWare 6.5.0 is installed and booting on an onboard SD card
- The 3x 120GB hard disks are used as datastore in VMware to store VM images and to serve as system disk for the VMs (and will be replaced in the near future with 2 or 3 SDDs)
- FreeNAS (v11.1) is installed on an 8GB (virtual i.e. on the datastore) hard disk
- The Dell H200 controller is set to pass through for FreeNAS with the 2x 1TB (in mirror)
- 64GB of RAM is reserved for FreeNAS
- 4vCPUs are allocated to FreeNAS


So far it seems to be working great.
The performances on the shares are very good: 110-115MB/s read and write (on a gigabit network).
The 2x 1TB drives show up directly in FreeNAS (smartctl can access the SMART data).
I'm struggling a bit with plug-in installation: couldn't get NextCloud to run but I didn't look in details.

All the installation and set-up went very well, I didn't run into any problems (besides of the NextCloud installation but I'll see that later).

And I was wondering if I missed something or might have done something wrong (or not advised)?
I didn't do much configuration on VMware side (besides the pass through for the controller and the RAM reservation). Is there anything else needed?


Next steps will be:
- Get the plug-in/jail to work.
- Use FreeNAS as replacement for my back-up system (and after it's been doing ok, use it as main FreeNAS system).

Thanks for your feedback.

 

[m0nkey_]

Next steps will be:
- Get the plug-in/jail to work.

Make sure you enable promiscuous mode on the vswitch, otherwise jail traffic will not pass over.

 

[Pitfrr]

@m0nkey_: Thanks for the tip, I'll check that out! (I just tried again this afternoon and I was suspecting something in VMware but I wouldn't have guessed!)