Virtualized NAS With FreeNAS and Virtualbox

[Shorty7778]

I recently Picked up a MacPro 3,1 with twin Xeon E5472 and promptly booted up boot camp and installed windows 10 pro, and i noticed that most things i would do would only use 1-2 cores, i had 6 extras, so my bright idea was to use the other 6 core, and 16 gb(of 32gb) of ram in a Virtualized NAS. Which i have never in my life even delt with( i fix cars for a living, gaming and computers are a side hobby) 

 

 

i get FreeNAS fully installed on the vm and am able to connect to it via laptop, so i should be able to map the drive and start using it.... but how? I was unable to even figure out what ip address to use and all the ones i could find had the slash going the wrong way. i could not for the life of me find it on FreeNAS's website of the googles. 

 

Has anyone else done this and have any pointers?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Why use windows 10 as the host? Just run something like proxmox or esxi on it.

 

Also if you want windows 10, microsoft has thier own hypervisor, hyper-v with a good amount more features than virtual box.

 

If you want to a vm you need a bridged network, not a nat like is default in virtualbox.

[Shorty7778]

Reason I want to use win10 is so I can use the computer for other things at the same time. 

 

I did a bridged connection between my wifi and the VM connection, verifyed operation using second computer. I'm able to connect to the console. 

Did setup wizard, but I can't find the IP address to connect another computer to the Nas and allow data storage

Also hyper-v won't work on it something about the CPU not supporting some feature it needs.

[Mikensan]

The benefits of FreeNAS are lost as a virtual machine without a dedicated HBA. Easier to just use windows to share your files. If you have multiple hard drives you want to use, then use Windows Storage Spaces.

 

Storage servers aren't CPU intensive on their own, SMB and software-parity are the only things that stress them out, and it isn't much.

 

Since this is a genuine Mac, I would virtualize OSX on it.

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 hours ago, Shorty7778 said:

Reason I want to use win10 is so I can use the computer for other things at the same time. 

 

I did a bridged connection between my wifi and the VM connection, verifyed operation using second computer. I'm able to connect to the console. 

Did setup wizard, but I can't find the IP address to connect another computer to the Nas and allow data storage

Also hyper-v won't work on it something about the CPU not supporting some feature it needs.

If you just want a file share, then do it in windows, no reason to do it on a virtual machine.

 

What cpu do you have? You should enable virtualization extentions in the bios so you can use hyper-v.

[Endeavor01]

Come on people, this poor man just wants to play with a NAS and figure out how it works. Power to you.

 

One thing about FreeNAS is it likes having it's own disk to boot off of and it's own disks for storage.

Once you got your prereqs boot into the shell interface and run "ifconfig". That'll get you your ip info.

Now you can log into your FreeNAS server via http or https (recommended). Your default username should be root and the password is what you set.

After you're in, Storage -> Pools to create a storage pool and Sharing -> SMB shares to create a share.

 

Edit: OP, if you have more questions just quote me. I recently finished building a FreeNAS server so all the info is fresh in my head

[Shorty7778]

ill be looking at it some more tonight, im really just looking to do something software based on the computer, i got the building, troubleshooting and breaking thing down, just havent done alot with software based things, after i get the NAS going im planing on trying  to putting some linux distros on it and run it off of it

 

sorry if im slow on responses, i have a full time job and im going back to school