Virtualization

[ICANSEEYOU7687]

I want to virtualize freenas. I am planning on building a computer as my main machine, but plan on beefing it up. 6 core and, 16 gigs of memory, decent video card.

I have done only a little with vm's, but was just curious how well this works. I was hoping to devote 1 core, and 3 - 4 gigs of memory, but i am not sure how well this would work with it being virtualized.

Has anyone done this?
Was also looking for recovery instructions for when a hard drive fails also, but did not see anything specific. Thanks!

Also if this is to much for my system, freenas 0.7 might work better for my needs

 

[jgreco]

FreeNAS 8 would, by default, like a lot more of your system than 3-4 gigs of memory. The distributed system is expected to be stable around 8. You can make it work on 3 or 4, though.

Virtualization would probably work best if you are able to pass through the storage devices to FreeNAS, otherwise you are creating layers of complication that might be difficult to unravel later. Especially a consideration when you've got a hard drive failed and your virtualization system does something wonky and you suddenly need help. That said, I think virtualization is a generally good-to-great thing - but take some time to experiment before loading your system up with data. You need to understand the interactions of your choices.

 

[ICANSEEYOU7687]

Thanks for the quick reply.

That's unfortunate. Both my machines need to be running windows unfortunately, so at that point making a windows raided partition might actually be easier, but I would like to have the functionality that these open source nas's have.

 

[joeschmuck]

You can run FreeNAS 8 64-bit in a VM with 4GB RAM without any problems, I do all the time for testing my builds and run it for days and was running 4GB RAM in my real machine for about a year. 1 core is fine as well but you would define that in the VM settings and you wouldn't really be taking away one core and giving it to the VM, it doesn't work that way. you could give all 6 cores, or 12 if hyper-theaded, and still hardly touch any CPU power as FreeNAS doesn't require much at all. You didn't mention your hard drives for storage.

My suggestion is:
1) Use a good VM program like VMWare Player (Free Product and highly compatible).
2) Setup 4GB RAM, 1 CPU, 4 Virtual Hard drives (for ZFS RAIDZ1 setup), One 4GB Virtual hard drive for the boot drive.
3) Use FreeNAS 8.0.3-Release (soon to be out) or 8.0.3-RC2 (out now).

My only concern about running any NAS as a VM on a windows system is that it's very possible you will have a crash or you will shutdown/reboot windows for one of any reasons and you will likely corrupt your FreeNAS system if it's not shut down properly. Other thoughts... If your MB doesn't support visualization then all VM machines will run slower and will not work nearly as well. VMWare Player will still be stable, or has been in my experience in the past, it's just slower.

If you have any questions just post here or PM me.

 

[jgreco]

The thing to be careful about is that if you're going to do any ZFS functions that are compute-intensive, like compression, you will want two cores.

I'm not sure I agree about the 4 virtual hard drives. If the data is already protected by a hardware RAID, then it's adding pointless complexity. If it isn't protected by hardware RAID, then that probably makes more sense.

 

[joeschmuck]

The thing to be careful about is that if you're going to do any ZFS functions that are compute-intensive, like compression, you will want two cores.

I'm not sure I agree about the 4 virtual hard drives. If the data is already protected by a hardware RAID, then it's adding pointless complexity. If it isn't protected by hardware RAID, then that probably makes more sense.

My recommendations are based on the fact a 6 core CPU will be the heart of the machine which indicates it will be a fast CPU. Changing how many CPUs are used on a VM platform is easy and can be done at any time. I'm only speaking from my personal experience using VMWare on my computer where one core is fine. I test the crap out of FreeNAS loading it up with file transfers both way that saturate my network.

As for hardware raid, I agree but my gut feeling is the OP is upgrading a home computer (not a safe assumption) and not many folks dive into hardware RAID solutions, in fact I'd advice against it when it comes to ZFS based on what I've read in the past.

I do agree that entire hard drives should be used directly by the VM and that is easy enough to do so long as you can keep windows out of it. If the OP uses more than one virtual drive on a physical drive, you are setting yourself up for data loss and you really do need 2 or more hard drives for the NAS portion of your system. This would allow for recovery of a failed drive (you need to choose the correct RAIDZ of course).

So to the OP, I think your questions have been answered. Yes, a VM will work, hard drive failures would be replaced almost identically as in a stand-alone FreeNAS box provided you setup your hard drives properly. If you have further questions it might help to know what you are planning for hardware and what your system is used for in general.

 

[ICANSEEYOU7687]

Ya I think I'll give it a try.

I will have two computers. One I am in the process of building, I really only have the power supply, case and 4 1tb hard drives. I think im gonna set up a samba share, and on the windows side run encrypted ftp to it. But the VM is going to run the 4 1.5 TB entirely, and I will prob add a small 5th drive for the windows and the free as OS's

Sounds like it might work. I just need to get a motherboard that has 6 sata ports to be able to connect everything. My other concern is power usage. But thanks for the replies. Replies on the freenas7 forum, and OMV forums are sluggish lol

 

[jgreco]

As for hardware raid, I agree but my gut feeling is the OP is upgrading a home computer (not a safe assumption) and not many folks dive into hardware RAID solutions, in fact I'd advice against it when it comes to ZFS based on what I've read in the past.

Hardware RAID under Windows means something different than it does to the rest of the world, because there are a lot of hardware solutions that offload some of the work to Windows drivers. I've had motherboards with such RAID solutions for more than a decade. I'm not crazy enough to *use* them though.

The real problem is that the OP is caught in a paradox. On a Windows-hosted system, he's got to be able to provide Windows-compatible storage; that layer ultimately must sit between FreeNAS and his hardware. If his Windows won't boot, neither will his FreeNAS. That implies either no RAID or something-Windows-supports RAID; ZFS is a nonstarter at that level, because you need Windows bootstrapped in order to get to that point. Of course, one can do a RAID for the boot drives and then maybe a bunch of other non-RAID drives for FreeNAS datastore use.

But that gets back to my point. If you're already protecting the data via hardware (that is, Windows-supported) RAID of some sort, the value proposition is often with RAID5. If you have 5 1TB drives in a RAID5 on your Windows system, you end up with 4TB usable, and you can allocate at least 3TB of that to NAS with 1TB set aside for Windows. But if you merely mirror a set of disks for Windows, and then pass off 3 drives to FreeNAS for a RAIDZ, you only end up with 2TB for NAS.

It is reasonably likely that a home user will be saddled with such a dilemma, given the ready availability of such solutions and the tendency of FreeNAS users to be towards the high side of the technology clue zone. There are benefits and tradeoffs to be made.

 

[joeschmuck]

Ya I think I'll give it a try.

I will have two computers. One I am in the process of building, I really only have the power supply, case and 4 1tb hard drives. I think im gonna set up a samba share, and on the windows side run encrypted ftp to it. But the VM is going to run the 4 1.5 TB entirely, and I will prob add a small 5th drive for the windows and the free as OS's

I just need to get a motherboard that has 6 sata ports to be able to connect everything. My other concern is power usage. But thanks for the replies. Replies on the freenas7 forum, and OMV forums are sluggish lol

What is the concern on power usage? How much it will draw or if your power supply can handle the load? If you're concerned about power draw then I would suggest you buy a MB with integrated video as that will save quite a bit. Buy a low power consumption CPU as well. If it's about the power supply, unless you're trying to power a gaming system, 400 watts it likely more than enough and some folks are running 200 watt power supplies or smaller but you need to size it for the hardware you expect to run.

Just to let you know, you could play with a VM right now if you have a system capable of running VMWare Player and a few GB's of hard drive space to spare, and of course have 4GB RAM to spare (on a windows system I would recommend you have 8GB minimum to try this). It would give you the sense of what you're doing before ordering the parts for the new machine. Just do the following:
1) Download and install VMWare Player
2) Download 8.0.3-RC3 64-bit (or newer) iso file
3) Configure your VMPlayer to create a new VM and setup 1 CPU, 4GB RAM, Four 20GB hard drives, One 2GB hard drive, set the CD to the iso file.
4) Boot the VM and follow the installation prompts of FreeNAS. And FreeNAS will be installed on the 2GB drive of course.

Good luck on your system.