General design consideration - host virtualisation kvm/xen/virtualbox

[kfnas]

dear freenas group,

I do understand the purpose of freenas system, however, I'm looking for very flexible oneinall system solution based on free basis.

The idea is to rely on the embedded freenas running on the physical multicore system with a zfs storage area with the installed virtualisation host on it (kvm/xen/virtualbox). The reason is to have one energy efficient computer (for instance Intel Avoton C2750 Octa-Core Processor with ECC mem) but with possibility to run a few virtual systems on it. Since vice versa it is not a good idea I see the following advantages:

- booting/running system from USB drive
- ZFS storage
- Guest running on other CPU cores
- Guest using the local ZFS storage for they guest system drives
- CIFS running on local host (freenas) with high performance

is this idea genarally possible to realise on current freenas version?
if yes, what should be the proper method to install the kvm/xen/virtualbox on it to preserve the upgrade possibility of freenas and to preserve the general configuration of the guest systems?

thankyou for an advanced and educative answer with pros/cons of such solution

 

[jgreco]

You can feel free to read up on this already beaten-to-death topic.

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/a...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/

The TL;DR is that this is easy to do wrong, typically leading to great sadness when something goes awry and takes your data with it. Doing it right is very difficult ... but some of us do run FreeNAS virtualized without problems.

 

[kfnas]

Hello,

perhaps, I wasn't very clear what is the concept/idea behind. I do mean to run exclusive the FreeNAS on the barebone with the kernel support of virtualisation XEN/KVM/VirtualBox.
My concerns are to have a very fast NAS build on the topnotch new servergrade hardware and ENERGY EFFICIENT with solely ECC support. This is yet available either over the new ATOM/AVOTON or 3d gen of Xeon (intel platform).
I would like to know the corret setup/support of the following virtualisation systems XEN/KVM/Virtualbox as HOST system running on the FreeNAS as mentioned above with the later upgrade of the running FreeNAS system.
I do believe that such setup running on 8 core system with some lightweight virtual guest running on top of it using local ZFS storage is top idea how to combine all needs on ONE barebone hardware saving electrical energy and storage (HDD pool). It is then easier to run let's say 3 separate servers as guest machine on the local ZFS system instead of setting up a RAID1 for system disk for each server if running ESX for instance.... What do people need is a safe and fast storage..

so what are the available and viable options to run the XEN/KVM/Virtualbox host systems on the FreeNAS please? (concept of running the system from USB/DiskFLASH with all config on it or another partition with the easy upgrade option (upgrade FreeNas and the Host system ofcourse)

thankyou in advance for your answer

 

[cyberjock]

So you're wanting to run FreeNAS with a hypervisor on FreeNAS for other OSes. 9.2.0 supports some limited linux builds(when its released). BUt there is no option to run guest OSes on FreeNAS at present.

So I think the answer to your question is "you can't do what you are wanting to do".

 

[kfnas]

Yes, the idea is to run FreeNAS with a hypervisor XEN/KVM/Virtualbox upon purpose with its kernel support, which could be technically loaded, I assume. Do you mean bhyve support will be added on 9.2.0 release?

 

[jgreco]

Actually I'm not clear on a few things. When I last played with VirtualBox it installed relatively painlessly on one of our servers, and I don't recall any excessively ridiculous requirements to make it run. There may well be a good reason that it wouldn't be able to run on FreeNAS but I cannot think of what that reason would be. But I'm running late this morning so I'll leave it at that.