Hello all, I’m new here and I’ve run into a roadblock. I’m having an issue passing through my onboard SATA controlled from ESXi 6.5 to a FreeNAS VM and was hoping I might get a little help. Before I go any further I would like to provide a little background on what I have and have done up to this point. I bought an old SuperMicro 1U server to play with intending to setup a small home virtualization lab. I’m not an IT guy by trade but consider myself an enthusiast with a reasonable bit of experience. That being said this is my fist go at both vitalization and FreeNAS.
As I mentioned I have a SuperMicro X8DTU-F Server with the following hardware: (https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/motherboard/5500/MNL-1081.pdf)
2 x Xeon L5520 @ 2.27GHz
48 GB DDR3 ECC Ram
2 x 4TB Ironwolf HDD (Installed in Server Drive Bays attached to the onboard Intel ICH10 Controller)
120 GB Intel SSD Boot Drive (Installed on a separate PCI Card: www.amazon.com/dp/B01452SP1O/ )
I have installed ESXi 6.5 on the SSD and it boots and functions as it should. I have successfully deployed a VM’s with data stores located on the SSD along with one for FreeNAS. FreeNAS boots as it should running as a VM. I will also use a VM as an NVR with the intention of FreeNAS providing the storage for video recordings. In the end I would like to setup FreeNAS to serve media files and provide a backup storage location for photos and the like.
Before I got too far into the project I read the great post by @jgreco on “how not to lose your data” when running FreeNAS in a virtualized environment along with the complete .pdf guide for newbies on how to setup FreeNAS and not make stupid storage decisions. If I can get all this working as I expect I plan on adding two more 4 TB drives to the server and setting the 4 drives up in Z2 array. This is just a home setup, so nothing mission critical here, but I would like the emphasis to placed on reliability and data security.
After reading the good advice offered in the “how not to lose your data” post (and after screwing up my first ESXi deployment) I wiped my boot drive, and first installed FreeNAS on a bootable USB drive, loaded FreeNAS and created a mirrored volume on the two 4TB drives. That all worked like it should confirming the hardware is all compatible and it now provides me fail over to recoved my FreeNAS data should my virtualization environment go to crap. With that out of the way
My plan thus far has been to pass-through the entire onboard 4-port sata controller to FreeNas and then share that storage back to the other VM’s as needed. As part of the effort to reach that goal I added the PCI card to host the SSD boot drive so that it would be physically separated from the other drives. When logging into the ESXi host and managing the hardware there I now see 3 sata controllers:
1. Intel ICH10 4 port SATA IDE Controller (I assume to the be the controller for the 4 hotswap drive bays on the front of the server)
2. Intel ICH10 2 port SATA IDE Controller (I assume to be the controller for the onboard DVD drive and an auxiliary port?)
3. ASMedia Technology ASM1062 Serial ATA Controller (As this is nested under a PCI Express Root Port I assume to be the PCI controller for the SSD
All 3 of these devices show to be capable of passthrough and I am able to set them as such. I have enabled passthrough on the 4 port controller, gone into the FreeNAS VM and added the controller as a PCI device. After tweaking the RAM settings and setting the full amount of allotted RAM to be reserved for the VM I can get the FreeNAS VM to boot as it should. But the problem is it still does not see the 4TB drives installed in the machine. This is where I am stuck.
I understand that virtualized FreeNAS is not an overly popular topic and I am stretching my skill set trying to pull this off, but I feel like I’m pretty close and I’m hoping that someone might be able to chime in with an idea (or tell me where I’ve gone terribly wrong). Thank you in advance for reading my post and for any assistance you can offer.
-Dennis
As I mentioned I have a SuperMicro X8DTU-F Server with the following hardware: (https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/motherboard/5500/MNL-1081.pdf)
2 x Xeon L5520 @ 2.27GHz
48 GB DDR3 ECC Ram
2 x 4TB Ironwolf HDD (Installed in Server Drive Bays attached to the onboard Intel ICH10 Controller)
120 GB Intel SSD Boot Drive (Installed on a separate PCI Card: www.amazon.com/dp/B01452SP1O/ )
I have installed ESXi 6.5 on the SSD and it boots and functions as it should. I have successfully deployed a VM’s with data stores located on the SSD along with one for FreeNAS. FreeNAS boots as it should running as a VM. I will also use a VM as an NVR with the intention of FreeNAS providing the storage for video recordings. In the end I would like to setup FreeNAS to serve media files and provide a backup storage location for photos and the like.
Before I got too far into the project I read the great post by @jgreco on “how not to lose your data” when running FreeNAS in a virtualized environment along with the complete .pdf guide for newbies on how to setup FreeNAS and not make stupid storage decisions. If I can get all this working as I expect I plan on adding two more 4 TB drives to the server and setting the 4 drives up in Z2 array. This is just a home setup, so nothing mission critical here, but I would like the emphasis to placed on reliability and data security.
After reading the good advice offered in the “how not to lose your data” post (and after screwing up my first ESXi deployment) I wiped my boot drive, and first installed FreeNAS on a bootable USB drive, loaded FreeNAS and created a mirrored volume on the two 4TB drives. That all worked like it should confirming the hardware is all compatible and it now provides me fail over to recoved my FreeNAS data should my virtualization environment go to crap. With that out of the way
My plan thus far has been to pass-through the entire onboard 4-port sata controller to FreeNas and then share that storage back to the other VM’s as needed. As part of the effort to reach that goal I added the PCI card to host the SSD boot drive so that it would be physically separated from the other drives. When logging into the ESXi host and managing the hardware there I now see 3 sata controllers:
1. Intel ICH10 4 port SATA IDE Controller (I assume to the be the controller for the 4 hotswap drive bays on the front of the server)
2. Intel ICH10 2 port SATA IDE Controller (I assume to be the controller for the onboard DVD drive and an auxiliary port?)
3. ASMedia Technology ASM1062 Serial ATA Controller (As this is nested under a PCI Express Root Port I assume to be the PCI controller for the SSD
All 3 of these devices show to be capable of passthrough and I am able to set them as such. I have enabled passthrough on the 4 port controller, gone into the FreeNAS VM and added the controller as a PCI device. After tweaking the RAM settings and setting the full amount of allotted RAM to be reserved for the VM I can get the FreeNAS VM to boot as it should. But the problem is it still does not see the 4TB drives installed in the machine. This is where I am stuck.
I understand that virtualized FreeNAS is not an overly popular topic and I am stretching my skill set trying to pull this off, but I feel like I’m pretty close and I’m hoping that someone might be able to chime in with an idea (or tell me where I’ve gone terribly wrong). Thank you in advance for reading my post and for any assistance you can offer.
-Dennis