Undoing my virtualisation and RDM stupidity

[Dave Stephens]

Hi,

I'm hoping someone on here with more ESX and RDM knowledge than me can share their 0.02p on this one.

When setting up FreeNAS (9.2.1.x) a month or two back, using a VMWare and RDM seemed like a sensible thing to do. "Direct disk access!" I thought. "Flexibility of a VM!" I thought. Anyway...I smashed on without reading any docs or forums, and here I am - a FreeNAS 9.2.1.5 install with one virtual RDM disk attached. I then read the forums, and boom...realised what I've done is probably not the most sensible approach to a FreeNAS setup. In addition, I've decided there's no way I'm going to run anything else on the box I've installed it on, so I should have gone for a bare metal install anyway.

Now here's the thing - I've actually spent a bit of time setting everything up how I'd like it within FreeNAS, and ideally, I'd like to not have to repeat that effort.

So:

1. If I set up FreeNAS on a new USB key and boot from that on my physical box, will it read/import the RDM disk (assuming I follow the disk export/import method of moving a zpool to a new machine)?

2. Would I then be able to apply my backed-up config, meaning I wouldn't have to re-do all of my settings?

3. Are there any other options I'm not thinking of?

Any help gratefully received!

Cheers
dave

 

[cyberjock]

1. It might.. it might not. I would just make a new pool and move your data there.

2. You should be able to.

3. Not sure.

 

[Dave Stephens]

Thanks for your reply.

Re 1 - make a new pool where? I want to un-virtualise...

 

[cyberjock]

make a new pool on your bare metal setup and copy your data from the current pool to the new pool. You'll probably have to use a second system temporarily since it sounds like you want to use the same hardware for both the current and new server.

Or just go to bare metal and see if it imports. It "should" but there's no guarantees.

 

[Dave Stephens]

Ah ok, that's what I thought you meant, thanks for clarifying.

If I do that though, is there any way of copying my jails (and settings) across so that I don't need to reconfigure everything again?

 

[hervon]

Last year, I went from bare metal to ESXi (just to try it out) then again to bare metal. All I did was to save the config (freenas - settings), boot with FreeNAS USB and load my config file. Voila! Hope it works for you.

 

[Dave Stephens]

Hi all,

Just thought I'd report back. After the replies I received I thought I'd just go for it - and it's fine!

The zpool imported fine into the bare metal setup, restored my configs and I'm now back to where I was, just without the ESX layer slowing things down.

Very happy, and thanks for everyones' help!