• 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.

VMWare, FreeNAS, and RAID....possible?

J

jsteinm1

Weaksauce
Joined
May 8, 2011
Messages
101
I've been wanting to run a home server for a while, but didn't want to go buy all new hardware right away to do it. I have a overpowered system for my needs right now, i7-2600k OCed, 8GB RAM (about to up to 16 or 24). I just started running Server 2008 R2 on VMWare workstation as a service, which is working really good. Now I am wondering if I could start another VM to run FreeNAS (or any other type of software RAID system) and grab some harddrives to throw in my system. Could I set the FreeNAS VM to take control of the 3+ physical drives and control them with RAID? Is this possible or even advisable?
 
I think you would have to create a virtual hard drive file that takes up the entire size of the additional hard drives, and then mount them to the vm like you would any other resource. VMware Workstation doesn't support dedicated I/O passthrough. To do this you would require a hypervisor that supports this (an example is Intel VT-d or AMD IMMOU) to pass the drives directly to the vm. Both Hyper-v and ESXi can do this quite well, but I can only vouch for ESXi currently as I have my own build running for test purposes. I have read that Hyper-V 2012 does a better job at passthrough than it's previous rendition and makes for a great Microsoft virtualization alternative. The only other issue is that passthrough only passes the controller to the vm and not each drive. My suggestion is to buy a high preforming USB stick and install either hypervisor to it then test out passthrough with your drives on another controller such as a PCI-e SATA card. Like I said I can only vouch for ESXi 5 U1 right now as it was far easier to setup and maintain than Hyper-V. Both hypervisors are available for free and with ESXi VMware gives you a limited hardware key that allows you to run it on a computer with no cpu limit (both socket and core count) but only 32 GB of RAM. Hyper-V does the same but with a much higher RAM limit.
 
I'm not sure about the harddisk situation. I know in Workstation there is an option to use a physical harddisk instead of a file, but I have never explored it before. If I am required to use a hyper visor then I would need to purchase a dedicated box (I want my Win 7 install as the host since I play games on it), and if I had a dedicated box it wouldn't necessarily need virtualization.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top