FreeNAS as storage for Hyper-V

[1kokies]

Hi guys,

i could't find much posts here so here it goes.........i have been using esxi for a couple of years now and the data stores are at FreeNAS. So far so good.

i am thinking to switch to Hyper-V, i have about 10 VM's. & they are all in lab environment. However assuming i start from scratch

1. Would FreeNAS be a good idea and compatible with Hyper-V
2. The Sharing permissions would be SMB, NFS or iSCSI ?
3. i am thinking to install Microsoft Hyper-V 2019 on bare metal and the 'data stores' will be at FreeNAS

If you have any experience or thoughts please feel free to share. i know the info above is very general and i am not very familiar with Hyper-V. Reason for switching is mainly due to licensing. This is only a home lab. Feel free to comment and i will try to give as much information as possible.

Appreciate inputs :)

 

[nimaajben]

I haven't tried hyper-V, but I have stored several VMware workstations's VHD to my FreeNAS through SMB and it works just fine.

 

[kdragon75]

You can still use NFS or iSCSI with hyper-v. Just pick one and research. IMHO you should still with ESXi. Hyper-v is for old Windows admins that can't let go.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Reason for switching is mainly due to licensing. This is only a home lab.

I'm assuming you need the vCenter/licensed host features and the ESXi free license doesn't cut it.

Is VMUG EvalExperience ( https://www.vmug.com/vmug2019/membership/evalexperience ) an option? It's USD$200 per year (or less, if you can score a coupon, wink wink nudge nudge) and you get access to a huge amount of VMware products. Great for learning and playing with things, and if you support VMware in your day job your employer can probably be convinced to cover the cost. "It's cheaper than me asking for dedicated lab hosts at the office, right boss?"

If you can't or don't want to pay up for VMUG, you could theoretically re-deploy vCenter every 60 days and refresh your hosts one at a time; a huge pain (and probably not in the spirit of a trial license) but doable nonetheless.

Failing that; yes, FreeNAS works fine as a datastore for Hyper-V. Or you could use KVM - Proxmox just got a new release that is finally bringing it closer to being something respectable and able to do things like "reconfigure networking without a restart" thanks to ifupdown2 and integrated migration off a host when it's shutting down or rebooting.

 

[1kokies]

I'm assuming you need the vCenter/licensed host features and the ESXi free license doesn't cut it.

Is VMUG EvalExperience ( https://www.vmug.com/vmug2019/membership/evalexperience ) an option? It's USD$200 per year (or less, if you can score a coupon, wink wink nudge nudge) and you get access to a huge amount of VMware products. Great for learning and playing with things, and if you support VMware in your day job your employer can probably be convinced to cover the cost. "It's cheaper than me asking for dedicated lab hosts at the office, right boss?"

If you can't or don't want to pay up for VMUG, you could theoretically re-deploy vCenter every 60 days and refresh your hosts one at a time; a huge pain (and probably not in the spirit of a trial license) but doable nonetheless.

Failing that; yes, FreeNAS works fine as a datastore for Hyper-V. Or you could use KVM - Proxmox just got a new release that is finally bringing it closer to being something respectable and able to do things like "reconfigure networking without a restart" thanks to ifupdown2 and integrated migration off a host when it's shutting down or rebooting.

thanks @HoneyBadger these are great alternatives