How to create multiple iSCSI extents on a HDD on FreeNAS 11

[aenagy]

After setting up FreeNAS 11 for iSCSI and NFS for my vSphere 6.0 lab environment I'm beginning to experiment with boot from iSCSI for ESXi. My thought is that each ESXi host will need its own iSCSI extent, each approximately 2 GB. All previous iSCSI extents were device based which meant adding HDDs to the FreeNAS virtual machine. I'm guessing that file based extents allow for more than one to reside on any suitable HDD (to save space and administrative overhead). After reading the documentation (https://doc.freenas.org/11/sharing.html#extents) and mucking around in the GUI I created a volume and tried to use that as a file extent only to have the GUI complain: You need to specify a filepath, not a directory.

Is this even the right approach?

 

[Stux]

You can create a zvol on a ZFS pool. It counts as a block device. It can be sparse. It can be snapshotted and it can be cloned. It's better than using a file.

 

[aenagy]

You can create a zvol on a ZFS pool. It counts as a block device. It can be sparse. It can be snapshotted and it can be cloned. It's better than using a file.

That worked.

Thanks.