installation media for freenas

[flank]

Hello all, new member here and a FreeNAS n00b. First I apologize if this question has been answered before but I couldn't find anything on it. I am currently researching FreeNAS and plan to one day replace my current home server setup. Through my searching I came across the idea of building an all-in-one type server which is essentially running ESXi with the storage ports set to pass-through giving any virtual machine direct access to the disks and FreeNAS runs in a VM along with any other VM's. It's my understanding that as long as I have the proper hardware (server mobo with lots of ecc ram and a cpu that supports both ecc + vt-d) this type of configuration should not present any unusual trouble.

Now my question has to do specifically with what media to install FreeNAS on. I understand that the preferred method to install FreeNAS is to install on a USB flash drive but if someone were to go with a all-in-one setup with ESXi (and since a USB device cannot be a datastore) what then becomes the recommended method for installing FreeNAS? Would it be ok to install to a hard drive? And then if I were to install FreeNAS on a hard drive I would lose all the ease of USB flash drive swapping. If anyone has an all-in-one setup would you mind explaining how you setup?


Thank You

 

[ser_rhaegar]

Before going down this road make sure you read:
http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...nas-in-production-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/
http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...zing-freenas-disaster-example-included.19440/

Personally on my system I have a hardware RAID1 for my ESXi main datastore. Then I have a VM with an 8GB virtual disk on this datastore for FreeNAS. If you need to change it out, backup your config and start a new VM, install FreeNAS and restore your config. Then you have the old VM as a backup. Just make sure only one is on at a time (ESXi should enforce this as both would have your PCIe HBA attached).

Also backup backup backup. Most important thing you can do. Cold backup + hot backup if you can.

 

[flank]

ser_rhaegar, thanks for the links, your FreeNAS experience thread was a good read. I was kinda thinking the same thing that you suggested which is to use a RAID 1 for the ESXi datastore. Since I already have a dell perc5i on hand I figure that would do the trick as the ESXi datastore and provide a bit of redundancy.

My eventual plan is to get a FreeNAS all-in-one box up and going and transfer my data from my current home server over and have the FreeNAS box run for a few weeks to test its stability. Once that is done I will re-purpose my old home server as a type of backup and probably still run a Windows based OS and switch to JBOD in a pool without redundancy and just have a single backup of my data, possibly use synctoy to sync twice a month or something. My current home server is a bit of a monster and not in a good way lol. I'm currently using a drive bender for pooling and redundancy with drives mixed ranging from 1TB to 3TB. This solution seemed good at the time but now that my data has accumulated its no longer cost effective to keep feeding my home server drives. What id really like to do once Ive set all that up is build a 2nd FreeNAS box and have off-site (at parents house) and keep everything synced via rsync.