Anyone have any luck with FreeNAS as a VM?

I've got FreeNAS installed as a VM. FreeNAS will run but the minute when I try to log into FreeNAS it will kill the NIC on the host. The ESXi is still running but the ip address is now 0.0.0.0. I'm using DHCP for the ESXi host nic.

I've tried with or without the RDMs. It just kills the host nic. Should I get a real nic?

My box is a Biostar A770e3 with a realtek nic (8111DL), 16gb and 1tb for datastorage, 4 2tb for the freenas via RDM.

Thanks

I'd go with an Intel NIC myself. What was your source for the Realtek driver?

I'm using RTL8111_8168_P55_integr_SATA_Ctrl.(AHCI).oem.

However, I'm gonna try r8168-8.015.00+geppis-patches+oem.

Can I just replace the r8168.o on the boot drive (usb)?

Thanks

You can just replace the oem.tgz it /bootbank and then reboot. Also check /altbootbank.

Dave,

I was able to try geppi's version. Same behavior.

However, if I dont use e1000 and switch to vmxnet2 then it appears to be working.

One thing I did notice is the two version different is size dramatically. The 1st one is under 100K. Geppi's version is 2.6m. Is it because the 1st version only offers e1000 and vmxnet2? I forgot to check Geppi's version to see what is available.

The oem file just offers system drivers. The ones you use with the VM (e1000, vmxnet2, etc) shouldn't be impacted. However, with some VMs you can get better results if you switch the virtual NIC type.

Dave,

Thanks for the help. However, there appears to be some kind of bug either with the realtek driver I'm using or some configurations that needs to be adjusted.

I'm able to access to my VM FreeNAS8 from another VM but getting time out from outside of the VM. Switching the NIC type does not help.

I'm hoping when my Intel Pro NIC card gets here, it will work as it should.

Thanks

I'm running FreeNAS 8 within a VM on ESXi 4. No problems here. It should be compatible with ESXi, but there may be a hardware issue. I know this probably doesn't help much, but at least you know it *should* work.

If you would like any more specifics on my install, please let me know.

TavisT,

Thanks. Are you using the realtek nic that came with your Gigabyte?

The realtek works with the VMNetwork but hangs when it is accessed from outside of VMNetwork.

I did manage to get it working as VM and VM with USB passthru. However, I'm only getting 20mbps with Intel Pro 1000/GT and CT. What kind of speed u getting?

Thanks again.

I'm not using the realtek NIC. From what I remember, ESXi wouldn't install because the NIC was not compatible. I'm using a PRO1000 NIC (Intel).

As for speeds, I'm not really sure what I'm getting right now, as I haven't done many benchmarks on the system. It was thrown together rather quickly, and it performed much better than the file server that was setup previously on OSOL. I don't fault the OS, but there were issues that I could not work through, so I fell back to FreeNAS. Doing so consolidated two machines into one, saving some $$ on electricity.

My network is plenty capable of fast speeds, as the entire network is enterprise class Gigabit (cisco 3750 switch). I have two nics for the ESXi and I intend to team them for more throughput, and add more if I see that as the bottleneck (which I don't suspect at this point).

The one thing I don't like is that I wasn't able to get device pass-through working with my current setup. Instead, I'm running 3x 2TB drives off the motherboard SATA controller, created 1.8TB vmdk's in ESXi and presented each of those to FreeNAS to build my raidz array. I hoped to use zfs as THE underlying file system rather than on top of the vmware fs, so that may be causing some performance issues. I plan to tweak it more when I have time.

I would assume that I'm getting more than 20Mbps of throughput, but my server has more disk throughput capability than any other machine on my network, so it's hard to say how FreeNAS is performing. Overall I am very happy though.