I'm completely new to this, so sorry if these are either stupid questions or not even related to FreeNAS itself. It's hard for me to tell what the issue really is.
I have a Windows 10 machine that I use for both Plex and Surveillance (Blue Iris ATM, but moving to DW Spectrum soon). The machine is also being used as a workstation during the pandemic. My Plex storage is running low, so I've planned an expansion, but I wanted to run the drives in a redundant array/pool to get a good balance of storage space and data integrity (speed isn't super important in my case). Ideally, I wanted to stay in the Windows environment, but (reliable) Raid options are very limited. After a lot of different discussions, mostly over at Hardforum and on Reddit, I decided to go with setting up a FreeNAS VM in Hyper-V and configuring the storage drives as Z1. I don't need FreeNAS for anything besides managing the Plex storage drives. I still plan to run Plex in Windows, which means those drives need to be available in the Windows environment. I also need to run Plex transcoding on my 2060 KO in Windows. The iGPU is dedicated solely to surveillance for QSV FYI.
For running the FreeNAS VM, I have the following hardware that will be used for no other purpose besides FreeNAS:
- 3x WD Gold 12TB HDDs
- LSI SAS 4i4e HBA
- Samsung Evo 850 500GB SSD
Other host machine specs include:
- MSI Z390 Gaming Edge AC (Virtualization turned on)
- i7-8700
- 32GB Corsair Vengeance 3000MHz (XMP)
- Samsung 970 Pro NVMe 512GB (Windows boot)
- A handful of other HDDs and SSDs for Windows (all on the board)
- Windows 10 Pro w/Hyper-V enabled
The following resources are dedicated to the VM:
- 2 cores
- 12GB ram (not dynamic)
- 3x WD Golds passed through on SCSI controller
- Samsung EVO (setup as virtual disk because that was the only option)
So far I've gone through the basic Hyper-V configuration and ran FreeNAS setup in the VM. I've run into two issues though:
1) Right out of the gate I started getting checkpoint errors when starting the VM. It fails to create checkpoints for some reason, then the VM won't start because of it. I've since temporarily disabled checkpoints just so i can get through the initial FreeNAS setup in the VM. This obviously isn't a long term solution, but I'm at a loss as to why I'm getting these errors. Since this occurs before even setting up FreeNAS in the VM, I'm sure this is more related to hyper V. Anyone have any clue what's going on?
2) After running through the FreeNAS setup, FreeNAS kicked out the boot IP per usual. The IP it provided appeared to match that of my ExpressVPN server that's configured in my router (host machine is connected to said server). OK, no big deal. I watched several videos showing how to change this. So I changed it to 192.168.1.150, and all appeared fine. But when I try to connect to it in a browser, it fails to connect. I tried the original IP address, no dice. Tried resetting network configuration, nothing. I don't understand why this isn't working. I'm following the exact same steps that everyone else does on the half dozen videos I've watched on YouTube. When I ping the address, it sends and receives all packets fine with no loss. I even tried disabling the firewall to no avail.
Probably completely unrelated, but I was not able to create the boot media as FreeNAS instructed on their video. I tried using that software to write the ISO to a thumb drive, but i had constant problems with the drive reverting to unallocated space in Windows disk management. I tried 3 different drives that were a mixture of usb 2.0 and 3.0 spec, and I tried several USB ports on my computer. I ultimately was able to successfully write the boot media using an 18 year old SanDisk 1GB thumb drive, but in the end the media wasn't even visible to Hyper-V anyway so I just said fuck it and dragged-dropped the ISO directly to the thumb drive. Once I did that I was able to run the install.
I have a Windows 10 machine that I use for both Plex and Surveillance (Blue Iris ATM, but moving to DW Spectrum soon). The machine is also being used as a workstation during the pandemic. My Plex storage is running low, so I've planned an expansion, but I wanted to run the drives in a redundant array/pool to get a good balance of storage space and data integrity (speed isn't super important in my case). Ideally, I wanted to stay in the Windows environment, but (reliable) Raid options are very limited. After a lot of different discussions, mostly over at Hardforum and on Reddit, I decided to go with setting up a FreeNAS VM in Hyper-V and configuring the storage drives as Z1. I don't need FreeNAS for anything besides managing the Plex storage drives. I still plan to run Plex in Windows, which means those drives need to be available in the Windows environment. I also need to run Plex transcoding on my 2060 KO in Windows. The iGPU is dedicated solely to surveillance for QSV FYI.
For running the FreeNAS VM, I have the following hardware that will be used for no other purpose besides FreeNAS:
- 3x WD Gold 12TB HDDs
- LSI SAS 4i4e HBA
- Samsung Evo 850 500GB SSD
Other host machine specs include:
- MSI Z390 Gaming Edge AC (Virtualization turned on)
- i7-8700
- 32GB Corsair Vengeance 3000MHz (XMP)
- Samsung 970 Pro NVMe 512GB (Windows boot)
- A handful of other HDDs and SSDs for Windows (all on the board)
- Windows 10 Pro w/Hyper-V enabled
The following resources are dedicated to the VM:
- 2 cores
- 12GB ram (not dynamic)
- 3x WD Golds passed through on SCSI controller
- Samsung EVO (setup as virtual disk because that was the only option)
So far I've gone through the basic Hyper-V configuration and ran FreeNAS setup in the VM. I've run into two issues though:
1) Right out of the gate I started getting checkpoint errors when starting the VM. It fails to create checkpoints for some reason, then the VM won't start because of it. I've since temporarily disabled checkpoints just so i can get through the initial FreeNAS setup in the VM. This obviously isn't a long term solution, but I'm at a loss as to why I'm getting these errors. Since this occurs before even setting up FreeNAS in the VM, I'm sure this is more related to hyper V. Anyone have any clue what's going on?
2) After running through the FreeNAS setup, FreeNAS kicked out the boot IP per usual. The IP it provided appeared to match that of my ExpressVPN server that's configured in my router (host machine is connected to said server). OK, no big deal. I watched several videos showing how to change this. So I changed it to 192.168.1.150, and all appeared fine. But when I try to connect to it in a browser, it fails to connect. I tried the original IP address, no dice. Tried resetting network configuration, nothing. I don't understand why this isn't working. I'm following the exact same steps that everyone else does on the half dozen videos I've watched on YouTube. When I ping the address, it sends and receives all packets fine with no loss. I even tried disabling the firewall to no avail.
Probably completely unrelated, but I was not able to create the boot media as FreeNAS instructed on their video. I tried using that software to write the ISO to a thumb drive, but i had constant problems with the drive reverting to unallocated space in Windows disk management. I tried 3 different drives that were a mixture of usb 2.0 and 3.0 spec, and I tried several USB ports on my computer. I ultimately was able to successfully write the boot media using an 18 year old SanDisk 1GB thumb drive, but in the end the media wasn't even visible to Hyper-V anyway so I just said fuck it and dragged-dropped the ISO directly to the thumb drive. Once I did that I was able to run the install.