Can ESXi store and boot VMs from FreeNAS?

B

Bviper

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 20, 2008
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117
Pretty simple question...

I have a Athlon X2 here that sits idle 99% of the time running a single Debian web server. So I'm looking to instead, install ESXi on it and run a few VMs to actually use some of its muscle.

However, I want to be able to access all of the virtual disks without having to go through the infrastructure client. That's where the NAS comes in.

I've found the ESX hardware compatibility pdfs and what not, but they really don't seem to help.
 
ESXi has pretty stiff hardware requirements. You may be better off just running vanilla VM Server. I'm still new to this, but the first thing out of the gate that I discovered was how picky ESXi was.
 
Disregarding your server hardware, ESXi can access iSCSI LUN's or NFS shares from a FreeNAS box. I'd go with iSCSI though.
 
Oh don't worry I've done my homework this list is awesome it says my mobo is supported, and it points me to this link which the very last post confirms that ESXi works on a system extremely similar to mine. (the motherboard, the processor, and even the video card are the same)

The question of whether or not ESXi can boot VMs from FreeNAS is the last question I need answered before I can start :p and the answer seems to be alluding me.
 
LittleMe said:
Disregarding your server hardware, ESXi can access iSCSI LUN's or NFS shares from a FreeNAS box. I'd go with iSCSI though.
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Agreed. iSCSI all the way. So long as you've got a Gigabit interface you should be good to go. Hell, MS even has a petty good iSCSI initiator for Windows if you want to go that route.

One thing about booting from iSCSI though is that you'll need a HBA that supports it. If you're trying to boot your OS from a remote volue then the system has to have it mounted first (via the HBA), otherwise you're looking at a diskless system and will be stuck.
 
BobSutan said:
Agreed. iSCSI all the way. So long as you've got a Gigabit interface you should be good to go. Hell, MS even has a petty good iSCSI initiator for Windows if you want to go that route.

One thing about booting from iSCSI though is that you'll need a HBA that supports it. If you're trying to boot your OS from a remote volue then the system has to have it mounted first (via the HBA), otherwise you're looking at a diskless system and will be stuck.
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I have an all Gigabit network, so there is no concern there...

But can I even use iSCSI? I'll be using two SATA II drives in RAID 1 for the NAS (I know full well the performance will probably suck, but its only for a few VMs). Is iSCSI just a protocol or are SCSI drives a requirement? And if its just a protocol, then do I need a HBA or is there some possible software alternative to making sure its mounted?

I've never really messed around with SCSI drives, or NASs for that matter. So sorry if I sound uniformed. This whole thing really just a learning experience.
 
I highly recommend Lefthand Networks if you want to get your feet wet with iSCSI. Download their VSA product, which is a essentially a VM specifically designed for iSCSI storage using the unused disk space on a local system. You can use their software free for 30 days, but if you want to keep using it you'll have to license it.

http://www.lefthandnetworks.com/vsa.aspx

Another option is to try their laptop demo to get familiarized with their product.
 
Bviper said:
Oh don't worry I've done my homework this list is awesome it says my mobo is supported, and it points me to this link which the very last post confirms that ESXi works on a system extremely similar to mine. (the motherboard, the processor, and even the video card are the same)

The question of whether or not ESXi can boot VMs from FreeNAS is the last question I need answered before I can start :p and the answer seems to be alluding me.
Click to expand...

That list is pretty damn nice. Thanks for posting it.
 
The dangers of unsupported iSCSI targets: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1405590

It can be dangerous to use unsupported iSCSI targets that are not on the ESX Server storage compatibility lists. If a target doesn't implement SCSI reservations, you might encounter data corruption when multiple ESX Server hosts attempt to share a VMFS volume.

Several OpenSource iSCSI targets are known to implement reserve/release incorrectly, and ESX Server depends on this feature for VMFS integrity. Corruption might not be immediate, but can happen over time.

For information on storage devices that are safe to use, see Storage / SAN Compatibility Guide for ESX Server.
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As long as you are only planning one host you should be fine ... just don't think that you will be able to build a big cluster and not run into problems.

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Wait, are you trying to install and boot ESXi from FreeNAS or only the VMs? From what I understand, I think you want to only boot VM's from it and install ESXi locally on the server. You don't need an iSCSI HBA for this, just any Gigabit NIC. ESXi has a software iSCSI initiator and it's very easy to setup and use. If you're talking about installing ESXi on a iSCSI LUN, you'll need an iSCSI HBA.
 
I can tell you what LittleMe has said is correct. Booting the ESX or ESXi host form iSCSI requires an iSCSI HBA wTHat being said, I have booted a completely whitebox config from a FreeNAS VM using an iSCSI HBA w/TOE. It wook a while to setup, and the performance wasn't great (FreeNAS was running as a VM under workstation on Vista Ultimate x64..there's a lot of details why the performance was not good) but it did work.

If you only need to be able to boot the VMs from the iSCSI target, then FreeNAS will work just fine. ESX and ESXi both have software initiators built in for this purpose.
 
BobSutan said:
I highly recommend Lefthand Networks if you want to get your feet wet with iSCSI [...] if you want to keep using it you'll have to license it.
Click to expand...

The thing is, someone who's running FreeNAS isn't going to shell out $20K for Lefthand. ;)

On a somewhat related note, Intel PRO/1000 Quad Port NICs cost about half as much as an iSCSI HBA and do the job just fine as they support TOE.
 
You don't have to pay that. They have demo and trial software to learn and get your feet wet.
 
Yes and no

NFS sure.

iSCSI no - the iSCSI implementation that freeNAS uses is not compatible with ESX's iSCSI stack. Use OpenFiler 2.3 for that instead.
 
Thuleman said:
The thing is, someone who's running FreeNAS isn't going to shell out $20K for Lefthand. ;)

On a somewhat related note, Intel PRO/1000 Quad Port NICs cost about half as much as an iSCSI HBA and do the job just fine as they support TOE.
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TOE is not supported, it may or may not work for boot from san, but I suggest just using it as a network card, booting locally, and swiscsi.

There's a patch for the quad ports too - bug with the VLAN header.
 
archivalbackup said:
The dangers of unsupported iSCSI targets: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1405590



As long as you are only planning one host you should be fine ... just don't think that you will be able to build a big cluster and not run into problems.

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Click to expand...

This is a CYA for the company.

Openfiler does it correctly - you may use it for small deployments/test environments/etc just fine. Just do NOT expect vmware to help out if it breaks and you call in ;)
 
lopoetve said:
This is a CYA for the company.

Openfiler does it correctly - you may use it for small deployments/test environments/etc just fine. Just do NOT expect vmware to help out if it breaks and you call in ;)
Click to expand...

That's good to know!

I've just finished setting up 2 ESX machines and an Openfiler applicance on our DEVLAN at work, and while it's not the fastest beast in the world it is more than acceptable. I'd imagine most of that is down to the lack of gigabit, and the hardware being pretty legacy (think single core Xeons and Pentium 4s), but you can't beat the price (NFR licenses)!

If anyone's interested I can debrand the documentation that I wrote as a recreation guide and post it here; it'd be very minimal and I'd bet there'd be some non-best-practice stuff in there (I wanted it to work, not to replace our production kit ;)).
 
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