• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

NAS on VMWare

C

cooter

Gawd
Joined
Dec 2, 2004
Messages
872
So I want to combine my pfsense router, webserver, and file server onto a vmware box. This is for a home setup and i love to experiment. The main reason behind this is that the computers that would be replaced are all P4 or P3 systems. I can put this on a socket 775 system I have waiting around. I am also hoping to lower the electric bill a bit.

I have a couple of questions however.

1. Will i see any performance problems if I move my pfsense box from a physical box to a vmware box? The physical box is a P3 933 CPU with 512 ram, the VMware box is a celeron e3200 with 2 gb ram (CPU supports hardware virtualization).

2. I want to replace my current WHS (physical box) and use something like FreeNAS for storage. I do not want/need drive pooling. My primary concern is the ability to pull a physical drive from whatever I use and be able to throw it in another computer to recover everything off of it if I lose a server/computer or decide to do something different. If I use FreeNAS as a VMWare appliance am I going to be able to put a couple 2 TB hard drives in it for use with the FreeNAS appliance and dedicate the drives to that appliance. And if something happens I want to pull the drives out of the vmware box, would I be able to put them into another computer (even if I need to use a Linux/FreeBSD box) and pull the data off?

3. How would a TF2 server run on a server that runs in VMWare?

This is all new to me and want to do some experimenting. But I would like a bit of insight as well. The main uses are pfsense (router), web server (windows server 2008 x64), file server (free nas would be my first choice), and I would also like to experiment with linux based servers to replace the windows web server in certain areas. Will a VMWare setup work well for this? I do not plan on buying any more hardware for this. If it works out, then maybe I would purchase more ram to accomidate the VM's. but to start I am not going to do anything.

Also after all that I want to make sure If i do this that VMWare is the way to go. I thing this would be better then HyperV, but i would like feedback on that as well. Keep in mind it has to be able to run pfsense if i do it.

Thanks for the help and the patience.
 
Which VMWare are you talking about? VMWare ESXi or VMWare Server?

1) According to some of the comments in this thread, yes there's a bit of a performance hit virtualizing many router OSes:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1569740

2) Depends on how you want to pull the data off. AFAIK, VMWare does not support direct drive pass through. Which means that when you remove those drives, the only thing you'll see on those drives are the .vmdk disk image files. At that point, you can start up VMWare again on another PC, add/mount the disk image files (assuming that the FreeOS is part of those disk iamges), pull up those disk image files, and pull the data off. However if you wanted to just to plug in the hard drives and read the data off like a normal hard drive full of data, that's not possible with VMWare AFAIK.

Do note that it's been a few years since I've used VMWare with any seriousness so take those above words with a grain of salt.

3) At least with VMware ESXi, running a TF2 server is doable:
http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2009/01/18/virtualize-your-game-servers/
 
This would be ESXi.

The two most important things would be:

1. Not losing to much performance on the router. A little is ok, as there are only a couple computers on the network, however one is a server running with a website, ftp, torrents, tf2 server, etc.

2. I also think that the nas would be ok on there. I can always mount it up if needed.

Anything else I need to know?
 
I have my file servers virtualized. The boot drives run off NFS and the bulk storage is iSCSI. The storage servers are Linux. The virtualization platform is vSphere. The OS is Windows 2008 R2. No performance issues.

The limits are your underlying hardware. If its fast enough to handle all these tasks, then you're good to go.
 
A bit late to this, but I've had good luck running IPCOP in ESXi3.5. My buddy had mentioned it as being possible, and at first I couldn't wrap my mind around it. Once I tried it out though, it worked great. I didn't notice any performance drop, but I had been running IPCOP on an undervolted P3-866@433 with 192MB RAM installed on a 1GB SD card prior. I installed it as a VM on my dual Xeon 2.2GHz (old S603 stuff) and gave it 512MB RAM.

I installed FreeNAS as a VM at one point but not to be functional.. just to test some settings out. I have no idea how the drive pass-through works. At that point I was using a separate box running FreeNAS, though I have decided to combine that with my new HTPC setup and just focus on using local storage for the new ESXi build... though with you mentioning it in here, I may have to give it a shot and see how it works. The board I'm using has 6 SATA ports, so I could load it up with a handful of drives if the pass-through works well. I'll try to play with it in the next week or two. Then I could leave the HTPC off most of the time and be even more power-efficient..
 
Thinking back about my initial trials getting IPcop up and running in a VM.. I remember assigning one of the NICs incorrectly and immediately rendered my ESXi host (as well as guests) unreachable. Had to go through some commands at the console to get it straightened out.

I think as I was re-arranging the ports, I had accidentally moved the virtual NIC of the "red" zone (internet) to the management network.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top