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freenas and pfsense

R

Rody

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 14, 2003
Messages
216
Is there a way to run pfsense and freenas on ESXi without vt-D? I think it is easy to set up pfsense, I will do some research on how to set it up to supply my vm's and the rest of my home network with internet. But I am unsure the best way to add my disks for raidz.

I made a mistake and went cheep with my hardware, and am realizing that with the extra stuff I am having to purchase I have saved no money and provided my self with a headache as well.

Motherboard GIGABYTE GA-H61M-DS2
CPU Intel Pentium G620
Ram CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB
Hard Drives Western Digital Caviar Green WD30EZRX 3TB
NIC Intel EXPI9400PTBLK Gigabit Copper Connection for Servers
and I will toss in a 200GB boot drive

This setup worked great for freenas by it self, but I like to tinker and thought I would try some visualization fun. I read Gea's aio guide but without the VT-D it wont work.
Also I am curious if nappit on open Indiana is easer to use than freenas, I have been a computer geek for a long time ,but man the freenas interface made me feel kinda dumb, like I need to go read a manual or something .
 
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pfsense would likely want to be on local datastore if only so the NAS being down doesn't take down internet access for all hosts. passing disks into the NAS VM without vt-d is problematic.
 
I use freenas inside KVM with no vt-d (just virtualized nics). Should work just fine.
 
You need VT-d/IOMMU to pass a RAID card directly to a guest. If you don't care about this, there's no reason you can't do an all-in-one. Even without VT-d, you can give a guest direct access to particular disks, so you can still build a ZFS array or something if that's what you are looking to do. OpenIndiana works fine for this. As danswartz said, make sure pfSense is on a separate datastore, otherwise a file server failure will take your router offline.
 
Robstar said:
I use freenas inside KVM with no vt-d (just virtualized nics). Should work just fine.
Click to expand...

is that the nas has no direct access to the disk drives. least not with esxi. i guess you can with kvm, but then you'd need to be running kvm under some other distro - the OP might not want to do that.
 
danswartz said:
is that the nas has no direct access to the disk drives. least not with esxi. i guess you can with kvm, but then you'd need to be running kvm under some other distro - the OP might not want to do that.
Click to expand...

You can use Raw Device Mapping without VT-d. I haven't tried it in ESXi 5, but it works fine on 4.1. Did they get rid of it in 5?
 
Still there I think, but people including me have had bad results (both performance and occasional corruption.) I seem to recall it's not officially supported either (yeah, vt-d for HBAs isn't supported, but that seems to work without crappy performance though...)
 
thanks for the reply's. I will play some more. I just get a new cpu. It looks like the least expensive cpu supporting vt-D is the i5 2400, though for the price deference I may just get a xeon.
 
Rody said:
thanks for the reply's. I will play some more. I just get a new cpu. It looks like the least expensive cpu supporting vt-D is the i5 2400, though for the price deference I may just get a xeon.
Click to expand...

To my knowledge the only differences between those and the xeon's is that they support ecc... not worth the extra cost in this case... just get the i5
 
well I finally got it up and running, but could not use freenas, I used Open Indiana with napp-it instead. I will do a small write up on how i got it all set up in a couple of days. It was very easy once I got it figured out.

freenas would not find my drives so i could make my raidz, It could have been a problem on my side but OI with napp-it worked the first time very easily.
 
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pfSense themselves release a vmware image, but there isn't one for 2.0 yet.
 
they don't do a vmware img anymore but it is cake to install.
 
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