FreeNAS in Hyper-V on win10 desktop?

[Peregrine]

Hello,
I'm very new to freeNAS. I've been reading up and learning for several days, but still have more to read. However, there are some questions I can't find answers to, so I was wondering if you could help me.

What I want to do is a very small personal solution, just to mirror two 3TB HDDs, at least for now. Originally I was looking into "hardware" RAID controllers, but apparently freeNAS has more benefits. I love freeNAS flexibility, dependability, universality and many options, want to be able to read SMART info, want to keep good speed transfer rates, and not waste a lot of money on it all. Seems like freeNAS is the winner.

My hardware overview (can provide more details if needed) :
- ATX full size case
- Sabertooth 990fx R2.0 bios 2901
- AMD FX 8350
- 16 GB DDR3 1866MHz (soon expanding to 32GB)
- MSI R9 270 Gaming 2G
- 700W PSU
- Win10Pro on 500GB SSD on ahci SB950
- 2x 500GB HDDs on ahci SB950
- 2x 3TB HDDs for freeNAS

I'm pretty set on LSI 9207 (8i or 4i4e... not sure yet)

I'm thinking about running freeNAS from Hyper-V on the above hardware.

Questions:
1) Would anyone see any caveats with my plan? Any conflicts or considerations?
2) Would this HBA run very hot, like megaRAID controllers? Should I get a fan underwear the heatsink on the board?
3) Does this HBA have any hook up for HDD LED so I can monitor the activity of drives connected to it?
4) If I start doing some partition backups from the mirrored HDDs on freeNAS to another partition on the same drives, would the transfer rate be only dependent on the drives speed and 1Gb network throughput? Or would there be any other considerations? Would it perhaps make more sense to keep more snapshots instead? The backups I can quickly mount and explore for missing/corrupt files. Not sure I can do that as easily with snapshots.

Thank you

 

[Mlovelace]

The windows 10 version of hyper-v does not support PCI passthrough, so for a freeNAS VM it's a non-starter. If you need to keep windows 10 as the OS you could do a storage spaces mirror of the drives.

 

[Peregrine]

Wow, thanks, I didn't think about it...
Storage space mirror of drives... are you talking about mirroring dynamic drives? Any minor hickup or pc reset and the damn thing start to sync all over, which is painfully slow and impractical on 3TB drives. It was chewing up my drives constantly, since I cant leave the pc on for 2 days to finish syncs, and every restart it would reset the syncs.. really bad solution unless used on servers you never turn off.

What about oracle virtualbox or any other vm? Quick look at virtual box shows it supports it, but relies on IOMMU. Another quick look shows my mobo supports IOMMU (unless I misread something).
Basically, any other solution I can use for freeNAS?

Thanks

 

[Mlovelace]

Wow, thanks, I didn't think about it...
Storage space mirror of drives... are you talking about mirroring dynamic drives?

No, I'm not talking about the dynamic disks in volume manager. Here is a blerb about it from their website and a link to read more...

"Storage Spaces helps protect your data from drive failures and extend storage over time as you add drives to your PC. You can use Storage Spaces to group two or more drives together in a storage pool and then use capacity from that pool to create virtual drives called storage spaces. These storage spaces typically store two copies of your data so if one of your drives fails, you still have an intact copy of your data. If you run low on capacity, just add more drives to the storage pool."

Unless you can find a way to give bare-metal drive access to the freeNAS VM, I would strongly advise against virtualizing.

 

[Peregrine]

I didn't know this even existed.. I've only recently moved up from the old faithful Win7 to the ugly Win10...
Thank you, I'll try using this. Already read some performance comparisons. Would anyone know if storage space in mirror configuration break as easily as dynamic mirrored drives which keep resyncing constantly?

Also, going down the road, I figured if I swap some parts around in my multiple PCs I can dedicate PCIe 2.0 mobo and 4GB or RAM to a standalone freeNAS box. It'd still be ATX full case though. So again, are there any heat issues I'd have to be concerned with when running LSI 9207 in that case?
Dedicated HDD LED hookup on the board? Would freeNAS have any problems with standard mobo and network controller on it? Or does it require only some specific hardware?
Thanks

 

[Mlovelace]

I didn't know this even existed.. I've only recently moved up from the old faithful Win7 to the ugly Win10...
Thank you, I'll try using this. Already read some performance comparisons. Would anyone know if storage space in mirror configuration break as easily as dynamic mirrored drives which keep resyncing constantly?

Also, going down the road, I figured if I swap some parts around in my multiple PCs I can dedicate PCIe 2.0 mobo and 4GB or RAM to a standalone freeNAS box. It'd still be ATX full case though. So again, are there any heat issues I'd have to be concerned with when running LSI 9207 in that case?
Dedicated HDD LED hookup on the board? Would freeNAS have any problems with standard mobo and network controller on it? Or does it require only some specific hardware?
Thanks

Storage Spaces is a different technology than dynamic disks in volume manager, so you don't have to worry about the pool re-syncing constantly. Performance-wise I would stick with mirrors when dealing with storage spaces, as their parity implementation, without a cache tier, is quite bad. As far as the HBA overheating, it's not something I've run into; and if the case has adequate air flow I wouldn't expect it to be an issue.

If you're going to implement the old hardware for freeNAS keep in mind that 8GB of ram was recommended at the minimum back in version 9 (iirc). As far as it being a non-ECC system, there are loads of posts on here about that. For the network controller Intel tends to work the best, Broadcom has had some driver issues, and Realtek tends to have performance issues.

 

[Peregrine]

Thank you!
I thought I read somewhere 3GB RAM being the minimum for freeNAS, but maybe it was an old post or I misread something. I can probably find 8GB in my stash (though it'll be DDR2). For the NIC controller, all my hardware is AMD based, so I'm pretty sure they're all Realtek. Perhaps I can buy and mount Intel PCIe NIC and attach to the AMD board. Hope they don't kill each other :)

 

[Chris Moore]

Any minor hickup or pc reset and the damn thing start to sync all over, which is painfully slow and impractical on 3TB drives. It was chewing up my drives constantly, since I can't leave the pc on for 2 days to finish syncs, and every restart it would reset the syncs.. really bad solution unless used on servers you never turn off.

Same problem with running FreeNAS inside a VM that is sitting on top of Windows 10. If Windows 10 has a glitch, it kills FreeNAS which could leave data on disk damaged.

Also, going down the road, I figured if I swap some parts around in my multiple PCs I can dedicate PCIe 2.0 mobo and 4GB or RAM to a standalone freeNAS box.

Hardware Requirements
http://www.freenas.org/hardware-requirements/

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

Why not to use RAID-5 or RAIDz1
https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/

FreeNAS® Quick Hardware Guide
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/freenas®-quick-hardware-guide.7/

Hardware Recommendations Guide Rev 1e) 2017-05-06
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/

So again, are there any heat issues I'd have to be concerned with when running LSI 9207 in that case?

Those controllers need good airflow to keep cool.

Dedicated HDD LED hookup on the board?

Don't need it.

Would freeNAS have any problems with standard mobo and network controller on it? Or does it require only some specific hardware?

You are better off with certain hardware, for example an Intel network controller.

I thought I read somewhere 3GB RAM being the minimum for freeNAS, but maybe it was an old post or I misread something

Must have been an VERY old post.

I can probably find 8GB in my stash (though it'll be DDR2).

Too old of a system, in my opinion, they burn way too much power and you would be much better served by something with ECC support.

For the NIC controller, all my hardware is AMD based, so I'm pretty sure they're all Realtek.

Dump that junk and get something off the suggested hardware or I can suggest something a little older from eBay.

 

[Peregrine]

Thank you Chris, all excellent info!
I think in the meantime I'm going to use some version of software raid, and when I get more time I'll research available parts options and will build a proper freeNAS box.
Thank you everyone for your help. It saved me from making wrong decisions, and prepped me to get it right the first time :)