Update from 8.2.* to 9.2.1.2, BM to VM.

[Metalstorm]

Ok so i've been running a install (USB) of FN 8.2.* for a while on bare metal.

My setup consisted of 2 x 2tb drives RAID 1 (SWR inside FN) as a UFS volume.

How I just got a HP microserver N54L, stuck ESXi 5.1 on it and FN (9.2.1.2) as a VM, now at this point you are probably thinking "oh, here we go again" specially after reading posts like:
http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...nas-in-production-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/

:)

So from what I can see i can't do true pass through of the on board controller to ESXi as the server doesn't have VT-d, am I right?

But I can (and tried) RDM'ing the one of the disks as passthrough (vmkfstools -z), yet when I go to FN I can see the disks but they have no size and they don't appear in the volume manager :( ... unless it never made a RAID 1 and all my superblock/data is on the other disk O.O!!!

I'm trying to follow all the points in: http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/

Its just the passthrough im stuck on i think.



Some further questions/notes are:

- This FN will be used mainly for a small file server, serving movies and some personal files. Absolute max users will be 3, but for the most part it will just be me. I'll stick and old SSD I have in the ESXi host and have added a NIC to get (can't remember the name) ..them both working together (~2Gb/s)
Other stuff will be a very small teamspeak server and plex server.

- I'm guessing once i have the old UFS imported i should convert it to ZFS, is this easy to do?
- ZFS requires a decent amount of ram, and i think ive seen stuff saying that for every TB of HDD you need 2GB of ram, is the physical HDD or the raid/volume size? So if I have a RAID 1 of 2 x 2tb I eed 4GB of ram?
- I want FN in a VM because I will have further VM doing other stuff :)

 

[dlavigne]

- I'm guessing once i have the old UFS imported i should convert it to ZFS, is this easy to do?

Nope, changing filesystems means a reformat. You will have to backup the data, use ZFS Volume Manager to format the pool, then restore the data.

 

[cyberjock]

That hardware doesn't support VT-d, so as you probably know we will point and laugh at you if you lose your data while using ESXi.

You can't "convert" between formats without destroying the data on said disk(s).

With that hardware, choosing to do FreeNAS in a VM is just a terrible idea(as you've witnessed firsthand).

 

[Metalstorm]

When trying to RDM my existing disks using in my of FN install i have this:

-rw------- 1 root root 1.8T Mar 13 02:13 t10.ATA_____WDC_WD20EARX2D00PASB0_________________________WD2DWMAZA9369662
-rw------- 1 root root 2.0G Mar 13 02:13 t10.ATA_____WDC_WD20EARX2D00PASB0_________________________WD2DWMAZA9369662:1
-rw------- 1 root root 1.8T Mar 13 02:13 t10.ATA_____WDC_WD20EARX2D00PASB0_________________________WD2DWMAZA9369662:2
-rw------- 1 root root 1.8T Mar 13 02:13 t10.ATA_____WDC_WD20EARX2D00PASB0_________________________WD2DWMAZA9524216
-rw------- 1 root root 2.0G Mar 13 02:13 t10.ATA_____WDC_WD20EARX2D00PASB0_________________________WD2DWMAZA9524216:1
-rw------- 1 root root 1.8T Mar 13 02:13 t10.ATA_____WDC_WD20EARX2D00PASB0_________________________WD2DWMAZA9524216:2
If I RDM WD2DWMAZA9369662 and WD2DWMAZA9524216 inside FN I get:
Name Serial Disk Size
da2 WD-WMAXA9369662 0
da3 WD-WMAXA952412 0
I'm not sure what these other 2 partitions are for each disk?

 

[ser_rhaegar]

They're 2GB in size, so I can only assume they are the swap partitions FN creates.