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
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