FreeNAS on ESXI RAID ?

[semaphore499]

I have a question if i have ESXI server 1 host and i installed Freenas as guest on esxi then do i need to do raidz on freenas because i already have create raid 5 on physical esxi is it necessary? The guest is not broken if the physicl is not broken.

 

[NugentS]

For testing purposes you can do that (testing features, experimenting on how to break things). However for any production use TN needs direct access to the disks - TN does not work properly with RAID arrays.

 

[semaphore499]

For testing purposes you can do that (testing features, experimenting on how to break things). However for any production use TN needs direct access to the disks - TN does not work properly with RAID arrays.

and should be config raid on hardware raid or on freenas if running in production

 

[jgreco]

Your questions, and the things you should be asking, are answered in

Virtually FreeNAS ... an alternative for those seeking virtualization

[---- 2014/12/24: Note, there is another post describing how to create a full-sized FreeNAS VM directly managing a bunch of disks. THIS post is aimed at people wanting to use FreeNAS to provide a little basic file sharing off of virtual disks on shared VM storage. ----] There's been a lot of...

www.truenas.com

In short, your ESXi RAID5 is fine to create virtual disks out of, but it only protects against the VM stalling, and (very importantly) it does not provide data redundancy, checksumming, or repair. For this, ZFS needs to manage redundancy. You can do this by creating a mirror pair of virtual disks, or RAIDZ1 of virtual disks, that are residing on top of your RAID5 datastore.

If you do not create ZFS-accessible redundancy, and bad data is discovered in your pool, it cannot and will not be repaired.

 

[semaphore499]

Your questions, and the things you should be asking, are answered in

Virtually FreeNAS ... an alternative for those seeking virtualization

[---- 2014/12/24: Note, there is another post describing how to create a full-sized FreeNAS VM directly managing a bunch of disks. THIS post is aimed at people wanting to use FreeNAS to provide a little basic file sharing off of virtual disks on shared VM storage. ----] There's been a lot of...

www.truenas.com

In short, your ESXi RAID5 is fine to create virtual disks out of, but it only protects against the VM stalling, and (very importantly) it does not provide data redundancy, checksumming, or repair. For this, ZFS needs to manage redundancy. You can do this by creating a mirror pair of virtual disks, or RAIDZ1 of virtual disks, that are residing on top of your RAID5 datastore.

If you do not create ZFS-accessible redundancy, and bad data is discovered in your pool, it cannot and will not be repaired.

and should be config raid on hardware raid or on freenas or both if running in production

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

You should only use ZFS redundancy with PCIe pass through for the controller in production.

If you don't want to use ZFS mirrors or RAIDZ2 why use TrueNAS at all? You already have RAID5, right? Well, the main motivation for most regulars on this forum to run TrueNAS is that ZFS is just orders of magnitude more reliable than so called "hardware RAID" when it comes to the safety of your data. ZFS is the most reliable storage platform in existence - proven over the last 15 years. I am not going to use anything else, ever.

So most people answering you imply that your reason to want to use TrueNAS is the safety of your data. And if that is the case, then all these identical answers are correct: don't use hardware RAID, period. If you have another intention or a different application in mind - well, you do you. But then there really are no "correct" answers here, because your use case is one of a kind.

HTH,
Patrick

 

[semaphore499]

You should only use ZFS redundancy with PCIe pass through for the controller in production.

If you don't want to use ZFS mirrors or RAIDZ2 why use TrueNAS at all? You already have RAID5, right? Well, the main motivation for most regulars on this forum to run TrueNAS is that ZFS is just orders of magnitude more reliable than so called "hardware RAID" when it comes to the safety of your data. ZFS is the most reliable storage platform in existence - proven over the last 15 years. I am not going to use anything else, ever.

So most people answering you imply that your reason to want to use TrueNAS is the safety of your data. And if that is the case, then all these identical answers are correct: don't use hardware RAID, period. If you have another intention or a different application in mind - well, you do you. But then there really are no "correct" answers here, because your use case is one of a kind.

HTH,
Patrick

Why can't I add 3 existing disks to pool1 without wasting space? Why duplicate raidz with the new disk added to pool1 which will waste 1 disk's size?

 

[semaphore499]

Why can't I add 3 existing disks to pool1 without wasting space? Why duplicate raidz with the new disk added to pool1 which will waste 1 disk's size?

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Because that is how ZFS works.

ZFS Primer

Background information about the Zettabyte File System (ZFS).

www.truenas.com

 

[Arwen]

@semaphore499 - Their is no one NAS to rule them all. Every NAS solution has it's trade offs.

Our goal here in the forums is to assist others in making their TrueNAS CORE or SCALE, a reliable place to store data. (And perhaps ask questions of our own...) If it ends up that TrueNAS is not suitable for a person, I'd rather they find something they can work with reliably.

Occasionally people want to do things not recommended, and they are free to do so. For example, I use ZFS in a striped disk configuration without redundancy, (but I have >2 backups). That's for my miniature media server's media, (but OS is Mirrored). I know and accept the risks, and my media server has been quite reliable. (Of course, now that I have said that for a 6 year old server, it's going to die on me soon :-(.