I've been using virtualbox to run FreeNAS 8 for a while now and am very satisfied with it's performance so far. It's tasked with a simple virtual disk and the odd time machine backup and windows share activity - nothing taxing and it works great.
My plan is scale this up somewhat. What's the best way to achieve what I want to do please?
I'd prefer to just keep it all in one PC. This is quite important as it is my main media PC and is always on already and don't want to add another box (however power efficient) due to financial constraints. Also it's specs are hardly tested in it's current use so seems most sensible to use it for everything!
i5 2500k, 8gb ram, win 7 x64, blu ray, 1x 2tb, 1x 80gb ssd. so plenty powerful enough to cope with a freenas virtual machine.
now with my plan of having 10tb addressable space in raid 5 i think i understand i'd require 6x 2tb drives. i'd buy a cheap raid card or two to provide enough pci slots (6 port ones are stupid expensive imho, and unaffordable for this project). what is (in the hive minds opinion) the simplest option of having these 6 drives available to virtualbox (maybe as raw disks?). would freenas be able to then cope with the software raid 5 parity stuff without too much impact on the rest of my system. or am i really better off getting a hardware raid card (really don't want to do this).
is virtualbox my best option for this project or might vmware be more suited?
My plan is scale this up somewhat. What's the best way to achieve what I want to do please?
I'd prefer to just keep it all in one PC. This is quite important as it is my main media PC and is always on already and don't want to add another box (however power efficient) due to financial constraints. Also it's specs are hardly tested in it's current use so seems most sensible to use it for everything!
i5 2500k, 8gb ram, win 7 x64, blu ray, 1x 2tb, 1x 80gb ssd. so plenty powerful enough to cope with a freenas virtual machine.
now with my plan of having 10tb addressable space in raid 5 i think i understand i'd require 6x 2tb drives. i'd buy a cheap raid card or two to provide enough pci slots (6 port ones are stupid expensive imho, and unaffordable for this project). what is (in the hive minds opinion) the simplest option of having these 6 drives available to virtualbox (maybe as raw disks?). would freenas be able to then cope with the software raid 5 parity stuff without too much impact on the rest of my system. or am i really better off getting a hardware raid card (really don't want to do this).
is virtualbox my best option for this project or might vmware be more suited?