after reading much about hte wonders of the ZFS System, decided to give freeNAS a try. However, my main plan was to Setup two gaming virtual machines with gpu passtrough, so i choose ESXI 6.7 to do that. That leaves me with having to virtualize freeNAS.
My Mainboard is GA-MZ31 AR0, 32core EPYC CPU, 64gb DDR4 ECC ram, 2 VEga Frontier Edition Card WC, 3 NVME SSDs (one inserted into the Motherboard - where the ESXI is intalled, two inserted in a pci 3.0 16x Card, all three running at pci 3.0 4x Speeds. - the other two are used as gaming drives as they are, for the Windows VMs) Motherboard has 2x10Gbit ports. Also a single 10TB WD Gold.
1x10GBIT port is given to the ESXI and ist what the Windows vm use.
1x10gbit is made into a vSwitch, and give to the free NAS VM
The 10 TB WD Gold, is "passed through" as a RDM with the command
vmkfstools -z /vmfs/devices/disks/diskname /vmfs/volumes/datastorename/vmfolder/vmname.vmdk
from the ESXI console, as shown here
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1017530
The Boot drive for the freeNAS is a 16gb virtual disk on the SSD where the ESXI is installed. Also 16gb ram is given and 16v CPUs.
Questions:
1)With the Raw Device Mapping done as shown above, does FreeNAS have direct acces to the 10TB hdd as it should have ?
2)Can you Point me to a place where i can learn more about data store, snapshot, share, im still learning to get the gist of free nas.
Statement.
I know freeNAS isnt suppose to work in a virtualized enviroment, but
1)Motherboard is Server grade
2)16vCPU and 16GB ram are assigned
3)The 10TB hdd is given as a raw mapped device - a 9.1TB device appears in free NAS as if a hdd was attached directly.
4)The free NAS VM has for itself a 10GBIT Network, even though my Switch is Gigabit in Speed, so no shortcuts here as well.
Isnt this suppose to be enough to make for a fail proof usage of free NAS ?
I would ask if i could do it the other way around.
Install freNAS directly on the PC, and use it to create two Windows VMs, but the question is:
1)Can i passthrough GPUs to the VMs,
2)Can i pass USB 3.0 Controllers ?
3)Can i pass the NVME SSDs ? (Probably i wouldnt Need to, free NAS could use them and integrate them in ist storage System)
4)Can i pass optical drives to the VMs ?
My Mainboard is GA-MZ31 AR0, 32core EPYC CPU, 64gb DDR4 ECC ram, 2 VEga Frontier Edition Card WC, 3 NVME SSDs (one inserted into the Motherboard - where the ESXI is intalled, two inserted in a pci 3.0 16x Card, all three running at pci 3.0 4x Speeds. - the other two are used as gaming drives as they are, for the Windows VMs) Motherboard has 2x10Gbit ports. Also a single 10TB WD Gold.
1x10GBIT port is given to the ESXI and ist what the Windows vm use.
1x10gbit is made into a vSwitch, and give to the free NAS VM
The 10 TB WD Gold, is "passed through" as a RDM with the command
vmkfstools -z /vmfs/devices/disks/diskname /vmfs/volumes/datastorename/vmfolder/vmname.vmdk
from the ESXI console, as shown here
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1017530
The Boot drive for the freeNAS is a 16gb virtual disk on the SSD where the ESXI is installed. Also 16gb ram is given and 16v CPUs.
Questions:
1)With the Raw Device Mapping done as shown above, does FreeNAS have direct acces to the 10TB hdd as it should have ?
2)Can you Point me to a place where i can learn more about data store, snapshot, share, im still learning to get the gist of free nas.
Statement.
I know freeNAS isnt suppose to work in a virtualized enviroment, but
1)Motherboard is Server grade
2)16vCPU and 16GB ram are assigned
3)The 10TB hdd is given as a raw mapped device - a 9.1TB device appears in free NAS as if a hdd was attached directly.
4)The free NAS VM has for itself a 10GBIT Network, even though my Switch is Gigabit in Speed, so no shortcuts here as well.
Isnt this suppose to be enough to make for a fail proof usage of free NAS ?
I would ask if i could do it the other way around.
Install freNAS directly on the PC, and use it to create two Windows VMs, but the question is:
1)Can i passthrough GPUs to the VMs,
2)Can i pass USB 3.0 Controllers ?
3)Can i pass the NVME SSDs ? (Probably i wouldnt Need to, free NAS could use them and integrate them in ist storage System)
4)Can i pass optical drives to the VMs ?