Vmware ESXI whitebox build

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Jul 2, 2016
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What was the reason to use the Plex FreeNas plugin vs having it run on another vm again?
Good point , My mind was kinda limited at this particular moment to run it from Freenas. But of course it totally makes sense to run it on another VM instance. Good thing i post my braindump at STH to safe me from these kind of mistakes.

Thanks :)
 
Jul 2, 2016
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Intel SSD just arrived to my house with DHL (for the ESXI datastore). In the meanwhile i got another Antec case for the Physical Freenas server.
rsz_datastore.jpg
 
Jul 2, 2016
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Nice. Why did you decide to go with FreeNAS? I like Openmediavault more.
Mainly bacause it´s based on Freebsd and i´m also going to setup Pfsense later on. I like the freebsd licensing (i´m also programming and if i decide to use Freebsd i think the license model is a less of a barrier than using Linux). But for now i´m using Freenas :)
 
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Jul 2, 2016
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At least the servers fit under my table. I´ll have to do a little bit of cable management when i pickup a 5 port switch i just bought online.Both Servers have 2 X 1 GB NiCS and i needed a small switch i can use for the servers,i chose Netgear GS105E-100PES (5-PORT web managed switch).

rsz_dsc_0434.jpg

A Fun fact , when i was building the physical Freenas server. One of the 2 TB drives didn´t show up when installing Freenas. I needed to find out what was causing the issue. I had to filter out the sata ports on the motherboard, the sata power connector and in the end the sata cables.

One of the sata cables i just bought must have been damaged because all the drives showed up after replacing one of the sata cable (after identifying the issue) .

rsz_rsz_dsc_0430.jpg

No pain No gain :)
 
Jul 2, 2016
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Currently this is my test environment (as you can see i have couple of disks running under Freenas in virtualbox)

Virtualbox.JPG


1)One machine is the ESXI host (Freenas vm will be running under ESXI and i´ll have 4 X 1TB drives in PCI passthrough for the freenas VM).
2) The other machine is for backup (if i mess something up on the other machine , cloud backup takes too long to sync :)

Longer version
try out ZFS replication from the Freenas virtual machine to the physical Freenas server. Do vmware snapshots and test Crashplan backup for on site backup. Also want to try out going from 4 x 1 TB drives to 4 x 2 TB drives on a diffrent hardware (import the ZFS pool on diffrent hardware and expand the ZFS pool with 4 X 2 tb drives).

Short version
Because i can :)