Disk Passthrough ESXi to FreeNAS

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FerG

New Member
Jul 4, 2019
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Hi, my first post here after discovering this useful forum!

I have at home a PC running ESXi 6.7.0, let's call it my "homelab server". It is nothing special, it has an AMD FX-8350, 32GB RAM DDR3, a 512GB SSD for the ESXI and some VM's (Server Core 2016 and a couple of W10 VM's).

I'd like to run FreeNAS on my server and attach a 4TB WD Red Pro disk and use it to serve some files to my VM's and physical PC's (a couple of shared folders). Nothing very load-intensive, just to get familiar with FreeNAS.

My question: Can I passthrough the 4TB WD Red disk to the FreeNAS VM? Frequent backups of the data will be done, because, you know, it's good practice. But I'd like to know from your experience if it's ok to do what I'm planning to try or should I take anoter approach.

Let me know if useful details are missing.
 

986box

Active Member
Oct 14, 2017
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My question: Can I passthrough the 4TB WD Red disk to the FreeNAS VM? Frequent backups of the data will be done, because, you know, it's good practice. But I'd like to know from your experience if it's ok to do what I'm planning to try or should I take anoter approach.

Let me know if useful details are missing.
You will need to passthru the HBA card which the drive is attached to.

You will need a minimum of 3 drives to build ZFS lun.
 

Spartacus

Well-Known Member
May 27, 2019
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Austin, TX
I see no issues, how many drives are you planning on using?
If its less than your sata ports on your motherboard you might not even need an HBA.
 

Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
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You will need a minimum of 3 drives to build ZFS lun.
Actually you can use a single device (unfinished mirror), but for any Raid-Z level you'd need 3+ drives;)

If its less than your sata ports on your motherboard you might not even need an HBA.
Only if he installed ESXi on USB or a drive which is not attached to the SATA port controller, else he wouldnt be able to pass that through since ESXi uses it
 

Spartacus

Well-Known Member
May 27, 2019
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Austin, TX
Only if he installed ESXi on USB or a drive which is not attached to the SATA port controller, else he wouldnt be able to pass that through since ESXi uses it
Ah I missed he wanted it on a VM, I thought he was converting esxi to freenas.

Thats what I did recently, converted all my esxi VMs to unRaid, pretty happy with it so far only drawback is no HA/FT.
 

Spartacus

Well-Known Member
May 27, 2019
788
328
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Austin, TX
Meh not for what I’m using it for, its now running on equipment enterprise parts that aren’t a decade+ old. So less I’m much less concerned with it going down. Thats what bmc is for :).