esx vSphere and FreeNAS NAS4Free?

[tangoseal]

Will the above mentioned ZFS based NAS OS's work in a virtualized OS like ESX?

And given enough ram do you think there will be any major performance hits?

 

[hotcrandel]

I set up ESXi on a 2.4ghz sandy bridge celeron dual core. I was having issues getting freeNAS 8 to install on this hardware. I ended up installing ESXi with freenas 8 on top. ESXi was installed on a small SSD, and I passed almost the entirety of each of 5 2TB disks hooked directly into the motherboard to the freenas installation not using anything like VT-D. Seems to work fine ,getting 80-100MB read / write over ftp. I'm using it for backups and so far I haven't had any issues. I know it will be a bear when one of the disks fail, and I'm planning on just replacing the whole thing, burning it down and re-making it.

 

[joltman]

I am running ESXi 4.1 on a SuperMicro X8DTH-6f board and a Xeon E5520 processor with 24GB RAM. I am passing the LSI 2008 chipset/SAS card to the FreeNAS VM. The only issue I had was that the VM wouldn't boot on install. I had to un-pass the controller on install. Then in the /boot/loader.conf I had to make some changes. This thread details what I had to do to get it working. After I made these changes, it all worked great!