FreeNAS 8.x and vSphere 5.x

[jgreco]

How about we all just stop posting in this thread and let it die.

Where's a moderator when you need one... ;-)

 

[yottabit]

I haven't read this thread, so reader beware.

I just wanted to say that I have a FreeNAS 8 serving an iSCSI extent-based export to a vSphere ESXi 5 diskless server hosting a dozen VMs without any problem whatsoever. Using RAID-Z2 on the FreeNAS.

Edit: okay the post above mine intrigued me so I read the thread. All I have to say is lulz.

 

[cyberjock]

I just wanted to say that I have a FreeNAS 8 serving an iSCSI extent-based export to a vSphere ESXi 5 diskless server hosting a dozen VMs without any problem whatsoever.

And that's precisely the problem. Everything works great until something breaks. Sometimes its been as simple as trying to replace a failed disk. Then, despite having a RAIDZ2 suddenly the pool is unavailable and insufficient replicas exist to solve the problem. Whoops. Now you lost the pool just because you used FreeNAS in a way that isn't recommended or designed. So my response to your comment is "so what?" because it'll work great, then one day you'll be spilling tears over your server when it ate your data.

Using RAID-Z2 on the FreeNAS.

As has been said in the forums before, even 2 disk redundancy has failed for inexplicable reasons when only a single disk failed in ESXi. So keep telling yourself you have 2 disk protection.

You might go months or years without a problem. But when you do, there seems to be a common propensity for all hell to break lose and suddenly you are asking how to save your data.

So yeah, the whole problem is that you can set it up and it'll work perfectly, until it doesn't. And when it doesn't it REALLY doesn't. And you end up being one of about 10+ people that have lost everything because they chose to virtualize against better advice.

I'd never do it, I'd never recommend someone do it without following the thread about doing it properly, and I'd never do it without having serious backups, because I don't want to be the next guy crying over his lost data.

 

[titan_rw]

Maybe I read what yottabit posted wrong, but I get the impression he's NOT virtualizing freenas. I think he's running freenas on bare-metal and serving up iscsi extents for another box that's running esxi. This is more of a 'main stream' use of freenas I think.

This whole thread is about 'how much freenas muscle do I need to provide iscsi for my vms'. Very little information about anything else. Size of vm's, how many iops each vm is doing, the working set of each vm, read heavy / write heavy. Sequential vs random read / write, how much percentage of write is sync, etc, etc.

It's like saying "I want to move, what do I need to move?". No information on how many people in the family, how big the old house was, how big is the new house is, how much stuff do you have, how fragile it is, how big it is, how heavy, how far are you moving, what time frame do you need the move to be completed in, etc.

 

[cyberjock]

Maybe I read what yottabit posted wrong, but I get the impression he's NOT virtualizing freenas. I think he's running freenas on bare-metal and serving up iscsi extents for another box that's running esxi.

Doh! You're right. LOL. That's what I get for doing 2 things at once. You're right, he's just saying his works. But he's not in one of those "buyer beware" scenarios. :P

 

[yottabit]

Correct. I contemplated virtualizing FreeNAS, but it makes things too complicated and too risky. I'm simply using a Z2 array for hosting an iSCSI extent that's mounted on a separate ESXi server. Typical scenario.