migrating physical freenas install to a VM

[Hisma]

So I installed freenas on a relatively overpowered system ( i7 CPU 930 @ 2.80GHz w/ 8GB RAM)

I have ran into situations where I would have preferred to have access to a full-fledged server, such as windows server 2008 or ubuntu.

How much work would it be to migrate my physical freenas system to a VM located on a server, such as windows server 2008.

I have a spare drive to put the OS on.

Is there any sort of guide I can follow to do this? I am sure this has came up before... but I couldn't dig up anything too specific after a quick search.

Also, what are the thoughts on this? Other than losing some reliability (if the server crashes freenas crashes, etc), is there any major drawbacks to doing this?

I appreciate any input. Thanks!

 

[cyberjock]

ZFS was designed to run on bare metal. Reliability of ZFS can be severely compromised running in a VM. Also, you only have 8GB of RAM and you shouldn't be using ZFS with anything less than 6GB. So big picture, you're system isn't that "overpowered".

The potential exists to have even a small issue result in an unmountable zpool. It has happened before to other forum users who swore up and down on VMs before. They lost everything.

There's a difference between what you "can" do and what you "should" do. It is entirely possible to make it work. Will it ever be as reliable as running on bare metal is a whole different issue entire. If you aren't making religious backups to a non-VM'd system I think you're making a terrible mistake.

Even if there wasn't the much higher risk of lost data, any problem requiring troubleshooting(errors or performance issues) are far harder to diagnose because you don't know where the issue is.. with the bare metal, the virtual machine settings, or the guest OS(FreeNAS itself). Many people asking for help fixing issue with VMs go unanswered because troubleshooting in a forum environment is pretty much impossible due to the added complexity(just as recovering from a broken zpool can be almost impossible).

 

[Hisma]

thank you so much for your reply cyberjock.

What you said makes perfect sense, and I think I should just create a separate system to run my server on.

It's simply not worth the risk.

 

[IT_Architect]

ZFS was designed to run on bare metal. Reliability of ZFS can be severely compromised running in a VM.

I haven't played with FreeNAS since ZFS. I will be setting up another NFS server as an ESXi 5.1 VM as a backup target. It needs to support compression. I MIGHT want to do SAMBA on it also. I don't need any of the other capabilities of FreeNAS. Can I set it up FreeNAS with UFS to accomplish this? (I'm wondering after reading this if I'd just be better off setting up a FreeBSD VM and adding NFS.)