FreeNas- Short questions

[Shpitz]

Hi All

Hope that you can help me with some questions I have regarding the FreeNas
I am working as IT manager for a production gaming company and I am looking to setup FreeNas for our DevOps that need the NFS feature for Kubernetes
I was thinking to Insall the FreeNas as VM on our Vmware ESXI with 8GB memory and 8 CPU, I am not sure if to set up the program under VM is the best practice so I will be happy to hear your opinion and if you already have experience with this kind of configuration:

my questions are:

1. there is any performance benchmark (read/write, CPU, network, memory footprint)? or any limitation for running the FreeNas on VM? or any other FreeNas limitation?
2. what are the options to create high availability to the FreeNas server in case of failure? My concerns are that the server will stop working and our site will be down.
The availability of our site is supercritical and we can't allow even 10 seconds of downtime.

hope that my questions are clear enough, I will be happy to hear your opinion.

thanks
Shpitz

 

[sretalla]

what are the options to create high availability to the FreeNas server in case of failure?

This question pretty-much tells you that you don't want FreeNAS. If you want to use an appliance NAS, then TrueNAS would be the IX alternative that allows HA configuration.
If you're desperate to run FreeNAS, you will need to set up some kind of load balancer (either hardware like F5 or as part of your Kubernetes config with state monitoring).

there is any performance benchmark (read/write, CPU, network, memory footprint)?

Hardware dependent and as a general rule, more RAM is better. Depending on the needs for IOPS, more VDEVs would be recommended to increase that. CPU is rarely important for that type of workload and 8 cores is far too much, but won't do any damage other than to your ESX capacity.

or any limitation for running the FreeNas on VM?

It can be done, with particular note to run the HBA/disk controller in passthrough mode to allow FreeNAS direct access to it or your data will be at risk.