Non production VM - is it Ok to use

[Loboexe]

I have recently been given an HP N40L and am planning what I want to do with this. I currently have a collection of old desk top PC bases running a number of "services" but would like to consolidate as many of these as I can into one box and hope to save electricity (cash), space, regain some network ports and reduce noise.

I also have a stand alone little NAS (a Buffalo LinkStation) that I have vastly out-grown so I have music, films and DVD 's scattered around my network as well as hard DVD's I would like to copy and put on a media server for a centralized library all the household could use.

So a NAS is a possible use for the HP but I also want to run other stuff so was looking at VM's on ESXi

I have read lots of blogs, articles etc (on this site and others) about using FreeNas on a VM and I get the point about not doing it for "production" data but my question is, providing I have backups and the ability to restore all I have, is FreeNas on a VM stable enough to use in a home situation ?

How likely is a loss of data integrity? If I am going to have to keep rebuilding it all then it will be a pain, but if it is probably going to work OK for months I can take a punt and see how it works.

At some point I will try to pick up a second microserver and then migrate all the stuff onto a dedicated box but funds are not in place and it maybe 6 months before I can do that

 

[amires]

I don't think that HP N40L is a good system for ESXi. Maximum supported memory is 8GB which is not enough for freenas + vms. Also the AMD Turion II processor does not have IOMMU capability. You need a LSI2008 based controller and also a CPU with VT-d or IOMMU capability so you can passthrough the HBA directly to freenas vm. I am currently running ESXi on supermicro X9SCL motherboard with 16GB ECC memory and Intel Xeon E3-1240v2 processor. I am running freenas as a vm providing iSCSI storage to ESXi and also CIFS storage for my home pc. Performance is great, I can easily saturate gigabit ethernet and I havent had any issues (yet).

 

[Loboexe]

I don't think that HP N40L is a good system for ESXi. Maximum supported memory is 8GB which is not enough for freenas + vms. Also the AMD Turion II processor does not have IOMMU capability. You need a LSI2008 based controller and also a CPU with VT-d or IOMMU capability so you can passthrough the HBA directly to freenas vm. I am currently running ESXi on supermicro X9SCL motherboard with 16GB ECC memory and Intel Xeon E3-1240v2 processor. I am running freenas as a vm providing iSCSI storage to ESXi and also CIFS storage for my home pc. Performance is great, I can easily saturate gigabit ethernet and I havent had any issues (yet).

Thanks for that! although I am running 16GB of memory. You have to be careful what make of memory you use but there are a few YouTube video clips on people that have done this what they used. So maybe not FreeNAS until I can afford or get a second box, still as it was free I should be able to use it to replace the old PC bases with VM's and rethink the NAS. Thanks