I want to upgrade my Curent server.

[Darkflame]

I run freenas 9.10 stable for a while now. you can see the specs down below.

but partially trough not able to learn linux very well and some software just available on it i want to upgrade my installation. you can see the hardware down in the sig.

What I would like to achieve is getting freenas up and running with a SLOG on ESXI
have a linux distro like ubuntu and a windows 10pro as separate VMs and probably also Pfsense.
I would like to LAG the dual nic in my super micro board and run most services like plex on one of the VMs preferably windows so I can easily update it manually. (I don't mind buying a key for that)

I am guessing that i need to buy a HBA to achieve all this and maybe even upgrade to 32gb of ram. aswell ass backing up all the data (about 6TB) and restoring it after as I probably will not be able to keep my current array as is. (running from sata connection on the motherboard.)
I just can't seem to find a detailed guide with current versions of esxi and freenas.
Also i need to be able to upgrade my storage soon as i am close to 6tb and currently my nas can hold 7.2tb I was wondering if i can add drives or if i should just buy 3 more 6TB drives and add a second volume. I would rather add 2 or 4 more 3TB gaining speed and 6-12tb storage keeping the 6TB for backup.

Oh this is all for personal use in my home server as a private person. I don't want to spend a lot alot and i just purchased a WD red 6tb to backup all my data on my htpc.
Anny help would be appreciated.

 

[kdragon75]

but partially trough not able to learn linux

Well there's your problem! It's not Linux, It FreeBSD. Thy look similar at a glance but are very different!

What I would like to achieve is getting freenas up and running with a SLOG on ESXI

So you want to run what we refer to as an all in one or AIO setup? That's doable, I'm actually moving that direction myself.

I would like to LAG the dual nic in my super micro board and run most services like plex on one of the VMs preferably windows so I can easily update it manually. (I don't mind buying a key for that)

I think you missing a few details here. ESXi will run on the hardware and control the physical NICs. This means any workloads or servers will be running in VMs. You have have as many as you have the resources to run, up to 1024 VMs

I am guessing that i need to buy a HBA to achieve all this and maybe even upgrade to 32gb of ram.

Yes you will need a PCIe HBA and even 32GB of RAM is light. Remember FreeNAS NEEDS 8GB all on its own. Also once you spin up a VM or two, it just grows from there.

I just can't seem to find a detailed guide with current versions of esxi and freenas.

@Stux has a fantastic write up for exactly what you doing.

Also i need to be able to upgrade my storage soon as i am close to 6tb and currently my nas can hold 7.2tb I was wondering if i can add drives or if i should just buy 3 more 6TB drives and add a second volume. I would rather add 2 or 4 more 3TB gaining speed and 6-12tb storage keeping the 6TB for backup.

ZFS basics pools (volumes in the old UI) are made up of vdevs. vdevs are made up of disks. You can add more vdevs to a pool but you can't add drives to a vdev. You can replace drives in a RAIDz vdev 1 at a time to grow the capacity of a vdev.

 

[Darkflame]

Tanks for the nice reply.
I am considering adding 32gb totaling on 48
i do think i will be adding 2 aditional 3tb drives in a ZFS pool coming to 6*3tb meaning i got a long time backing up and restoring ahead at 100-110mbs about 6tb i would realy love 10gigabit ethernet

the HBA is something i dont really know with what to do.

can I do link aggregation on esxi?

 

[Scharbag]

This is a great writeup for FreeNAS on ESXI. It is based on 9.10 and ESXI 6 but it allplies to 11.x and 6.5 just fine. The web interface is a bit different. Another post shows Corral installed on 6.5. Between these 2 blog posts and Stux's writeup, all the info is there.

HBA cards come in many flavours. I run older LSI 9211-8i cards in IT mode and have for years. They are great cards with fantastic FreeNAS compatibility. They will work with SAS and SATA drives and seem to work fine with big hard drives. If you need more than 8 drives, you can use multiple HBA adapters or SAS expanders like the Intel RES2SV240.

I have been running FreeNAS on ESXI for years with no issues. You do need a CPU that can handle VT-d to allow for hardware passthrough for the HBA card(s). I bought a used Supermicro server with gobs of RAM and dual Xeons for cheap.

As for the networking side, I cannot answer that.

Cheers,

 

[kdragon75]

can I do link aggregation on esxi?

Take a step back from what you're picturing in your mind and tell us how it will be used. You mentioned backups and restores. How long between backups is acceptable? What about restore time? I'm not asking what would be nice, but what's required. Are you backing up your FreeNAS to another FreeNAS? You might be able to use a point to point 10gbe link to save the cost of a switch.