Migrating VM to jails ?

[Delivereath]

Hi,

I'm using FreeNAS as an ESXI virtual machine. I also have a few other VM (Plex, Owncloud, and so on). It seems that a lot of the tools I'm using are available as plugins.

From a performance point of view, is there a risk migrating my VMs to jails/plugins ? What about RAM requirements ? I've allocated 8GB to FreeNAS. Is it possible to keep this 8GB to FreeNAS but add some more to the jails ?

Finally, should I use FreeBSD jails or virtualbox ones ?

Thanks !

 

[danb35]

You should use FreeBSD jails unless you want to install VMs under VirtualBox. In that case, you would install a VirtualBox jail, and then create VMs as desired in VirtualBox. I can't see any reason you'd want to do that, though--it's my understanding that ESXi is a much better hypervisor than VirtualBox (though I have no experience with ESXi to say one way or the other).

I would expect the RAM requirement for (FreeNAS VM with Plex and Owncloud jails) to be less than the RAM requirement for (FreeNAS VM + Plex VM + Owncloud VM). I'd similarly expect the CPU and other resource requirements to be less. However, the resource requirements for the FreeNAS VM will increase, particularly RAM. I wouldn't want to run FreeNAS with Plex with less than 16 GB of RAM.

 

[Delivereath]

Thanks for your quick reply.

My system runs with 32 GB so I will allocate some more RAM to my FreeNAS VM and install the plugins I need. There is no need to define how much RAM I want to allocate to Plex/Owncloud and how much to keep for FreeNAS core ?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Jails don't provide any kind of resource containers. Jails just provide a sandboxed execution environment. So applications in jails will get full access to cpu and memory of the host machine.

 

[depasseg]

Plex can be kinda RAM intensive. And 8GB is the min for FreeNAS 9.3. So my suggestion would be to increase the RAM of your FN VM. Do you have any idea how much RAM plex uses under your current workload?

 

[Delivereath]

Thanks for the details.

At the moment my Debian/Plex virtual machine has 4GB allocated but I've never seen it using more than 2GB. I know that ZFS will use as much RAM as possible. How can I be sure that some RAM will remain available for Plex and Owncloud to perform correctly ? And on the other side, is there a risk that Plex consumes too much RAM and less than 8GB is left available for FreeNAS/ZFS ?

I will probably allocate 24 GB of RAM for FreeNAS and its plugins. So I hope not to have this kind of RAM issues.

 

[cyberjock]

For the record, running Plex on Debian isn't really a good comparison for guesstimating how much RAM you'll need on FreeBSD. That being said, I'm sure 24GB of RAM will be fine unless you are about to tell us you want to run 20 Plex jails simultaneously. ;)