Moving from ESXi host to FreeNAS host?

[d3ssen]

TL;DR: Can FreeNAS replace an ESXi host with 5 VM's providing shared folders, media streaming and Apache services?

(This concerns a home network environment, not a corporate environment. There is no Active Directory involved)

Some years ago I converted a desktop system into a VMware ESXi host. It's currently running 5 VM's; one of which is a Windows Server 2008 R2, the others are Ubuntu Servers v18.04 & v20.04.

The Windows VM is the primary system for network shared folders where users save their files. It also makes daily backups of these files.
The Ubuntu VM's provide a variety of services including an Apache host, a music streaming service (aka Internet radio), a music database (like Spotify), a cloud service (ownCloud).

With FreeNAS providing shared folders out of the box (as far as I understand) I think it is a good idea to replace the Windows server with FreeNAS. But since FreeNAS also provides Jails and has VM features I'm considering to replace the ESXi host completely with FreeNAS and rebuild the Ubuntu Servers (or their services) inside FreeNAS.

But is this wise?
Can FreeNAS provide the resources and options I need to replace the ESXi host and its VM's.

 

[Samuel Tai]

It is feasible, but you would need a really beefy FreeNAS host, as bhyve doesn't have memory ballooning. Each VM would need to have its memory wired. Jails would offer a much lighter footprint, but you would have to reimplement services to their FreeBSD equivalents for those applications where a plugin wasn't available.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I do it at work and at home. The systems in the office provide VMs for internal services where we cannot avoid running Windows, or Linux VMs to developers when e.g. the latest ELK stack is not available for FreeBSD, or something that mandates Docker, or ...
Theses systems are 24 core, 48 threads, 256 G of RAM NVME only Ryzen machines. Beefy, ey? But you definitely don't need to go that far. I just wanted to show a high end example that I run in production. No complaints, everything working as intended. Raw computing power galore ...

At home I have a Xeon D 1541, 8 cores, 16 threads with 64 G of memory. I easily run 2 Ubuntu VMs running Confluence with MySQL, 8 G, 2 cores each. Additionally one Windows 10 VM that is rarely used, same parameters. And a 4 G, 1 core VM for docker containers like OnlyOffice.
In addition 7 jails with various applications like Nextcloud, Gitea, Influx+Grafana.

Storage is 4x 4T in RAIDZ2 as a data dump and a mirror of 2 SSDs for the VMs. Perfectly stable and reliable work horse.

For precise specs see below in my signature - that should give you a good estimate of what can ve done. My home system is definitely "prosumer" and probably ran around 1500€ altogether. i don't have precise numbers, because I kept some of the hardware when I upgraded the box to that spiffier CPU.

@Samuel Tai I am not quite sure VM memory is wired, My system consumes far less than nominally assigned to the VMs as long as these don't max out their memory. It would be nice to have proper ballooning, though.

Kind regards,
Patrick