esxi -> freenas vm -> raidz testing

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matlock

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Mar 2, 2012
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hey all-
(just a little write up of my experience, maybe someone will benefit from)
I have 6 drives installed.
I've got esxi installed on my nas box and have dedicated 1 drive for esxi and vm's. I then have freenas installed as a vm. (i'm aware of the lack of redundancy here)

I have the other 5 drives being passed on to my freenas vm as per the instructions provided here.
http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/
(if there is a better way to do this please let me know)

I have created a raidz volume with the 5 drives. to test the raidz - i powered down the entire server, and removed one of the data drives.

When I powered up esxi, and try to then power up the freenas server i get an error informing me that I can't power on the server because one of the disks is "invalid". To get around this - from the vsphere client, where i manage the vm's, i edited the settings for the freenas vm- and removed the 'faulty' hard drive.

I'm now able to get into freenas. Freenas alerted me that their is a degraded disk, as expected, and upon checking the data on my cifs' - all is there. (raidz did its job =))

I powered down freenas, and esxi, put a different hard drive in, powered up esxi and performed the above steps and 'passed' the new drive onto freenas.

Going back into freenas, i still have a degraded array I went to my degraded raidz volume, viewed disks, and replaced the bad drive with the newly added drive.
Reviewing the status of the volume/raidz - i can see that all disks are online.

I was concerned still at this point, as i was still getting a 'degraded' alert. After a few minutes - the red alert (in the upper right) turned green, and my array was healthy again. I didn't have to do anything to get the rebuilding process to start, it just did its magic. I do wish I was informed though, that the rebuilding was taking place- is there a way to check on the rebuild process/status?

Well- i hope this helps, and some benefit from this.

Thanks-
Matlock
 

silverwater

Cadet
Joined
Oct 3, 2012
Messages
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Here is how I got mine FreeNAS works within ESXi in a N40L box.

For RDM, N40L doesn't support device pass-thru unfortunately. There is workaround that works - http://cyborgworkshop.org/2011/01/08/enabling-raw-sata-access-in-esxi-free/

What it does is create the descriptor files that link to actual hard drives, so FreeNAS was actually dealing with raw drives not ESXi VMDK/datastore. That is you can pull the drive out and attach them to another FreeNAS system and import the pool.

I have a M1015 controller that provides FreeNAS access to 8 sata drives, works like a champ.
 

mr_sticky

Cadet
Joined
Oct 15, 2012
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Hi guys,
i've been running freenas (and nas4free for a while) under ESXi for a few years as you guys are. However I've run in to a problem during an upgrade that I'm hoping can be solved.

My shiny new 3TB drives are not attaching properly under BSD it seems. They are connected to the VM using physical RDM's created by hand using the same method referenced earlier. The issue is that they show as having 0MB available in freenas. I've tried different versions of freenas and nas4free and run in to the same issue each time. I can confirm it's a FreeBSD based issue as installed Debian and Solaris based OS's which are able to access the same RDM disks and provide 3TB of space.

I have a feeling it is something related to how the physical RDM is presented by VMWare 5.0 U1, as virtual RDM's seem to work fine -however the kicker is that i cannot create virtual RDM's at 3TB (I get an error due to 2TB max size in VMFS).

Anyone have any ideas on this?

cheers,
Ian
 

tabs

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 31, 2012
Messages
11
Thanks for this , have managed to do this so that freenas was seeing my HD and could Volume Manager to import the disk and mount it as ZFS.

Didn't need to do anything else other than this:


Finally managed to sort this. Am running ESXi 5 off internal usb. First 230 HD using for VMs and isos. I then have a 2tb WD red HD . I set this up to get raw access to it by following this blog post:
http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/

However I didn't read through it all first! As a consequence when he adds at the end;

"One thing I forgot to show in the screen shots, is that you should create your RDM’s on a new SCSI controller!"

I'd already set it up using iSCSI 0:1 , so far seems to be working ok?:confused:

Now just need to start learning how to use freeNAS so I can get my media library up and running!:)
 

mr_sticky

Cadet
Joined
Oct 15, 2012
Messages
2
Hi Tab,
I got excited when I saw your post and tried it out but have not seen any change by bumping up the SCSI ID as the blog points out (see screenshot). I tried various flavours of FreeBSD and found they all had the same issue with Physical RDM's. In the end I went with Solaris 11, it's not as light weight or friendly as FreeNAS or NAS4Free, but does support ZFS encryption which I like. Too bad, maybe by next time I upgrade my storage solution this will be resolved with FreeBSD.

Cheers!

rdms.JPG


Thanks for this , have managed to do this so that freenas was seeing my HD and could Volume Manager to import the disk and mount it as ZFS.

Didn't need to do anything else other than this:


Finally managed to sort this. Am running ESXi 5 off internal usb. First 230 HD using for VMs and isos. I then have a 2tb WD red HD . I set this up to get raw access to it by following this blog post:
http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/

However I didn't read through it all first! As a consequence when he adds at the end;

"One thing I forgot to show in the screen shots, is that you should create your RDM’s on a new SCSI controller!"

I'd already set it up using iSCSI 0:1 , so far seems to be working ok?:confused:

Now just need to start learning how to use freeNAS so I can get my media library up and running!:)
 

tabs

Dabbler
Joined
Oct 31, 2012
Messages
11
I am afraid I'm fairly new to all this so am learning as I go along! Hope you get it sorted as you want asap mr sticky!:)
 
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