Virtualization

[pguerra75]

I work at a small company as an Electrical Engineer and have taken on the additional duty of IT. For the past 5 years we have been running Windows Server Essentials 2016(started with 2012) with a fair bit of success, I love the VPN experience, computer backups, integration with O-365 and Exchange and really want to keep that moving forward but one thing I have not done is virtualize the install making hardware migration a pain. There are also additional services running on the server I would like to virtualize. The other problem I am running into is that some of my users are building rather large and complex Solidworks assemblies (multiple gigs) and 1 gig network is simply not working for them.

So I was hoping I could use you guys as a sounding board for my proposed solution.

My idea was to run freeNas to essentially control the drives and to run as a VM manager.
Running windows server essentials 2016 inside a VM (would this still receive the ram cache benefits from ZFS?) Assigning it 2 10 gig nics
Running several other VMs (freePBX,  Solidworks License manager, etc)
Using freeNas to backup everything off site.

I would like to keep the shares managed by the Windows Server as my users love the use of the essentials plugin and anywhere access.
I guess my main concerns are, will I be shooting myself in the foot by running the shares off the windows server inside of the VM? Does freeNas offsite backup include the VMs?

Thanks for your time,

Paul

[LIGISTX]

So, I am FAR from an expert at any of this, but I do run FreeNAS Virtualized under ESXi, in a homelab, for fun... lol. Let me be clear about that from the start, its a homelab, for fun.

 

Now that that is out of the way, you very likely could do what your after, but I would suggest you really dial in your needs and figure out a budget for the project, because it can get pricey depending on requirements. I would point you to the freenas forums as some of those folks are VERY well versed in these things and seem to be sysadmins of the sort as their actual jobs... not a random dude with a homelab who used their advice to get rollin. But I will get to that after I give you some anecdotal experience from myself.

 

I wanted to use ESXi to spin up multiple ubuntu server VM's just to screw around with and do some automation next to freenas; let freenas do what freenas does which is handle ZFS very well, and use other OS's for what they do best, which is literally anything and everything else. As long as you get the correct hardware (easy these days) so you can pass through an HBA to freenas so ZFS can have bare metal access to the drives, your golden. Without that, don't even try. But as I said, ever new Xeon supports this, so nbd. My homelab is in my sig, so even a few year old i3 can do it as shown in my sig...  Now, I run a windows network, so I have my shares mounted as SMB shares in windows and it all works fine for my small simple use case. For you, if you want to use ZFS as a way for a win server VM to hit it without massive latency panaties, your going to want to set up a iSCSI target, which takes more CPU overhead then I am willing to dedicate to it as I only have an i3, but once again, this is up to your build-out and needs; the freenas folks will better help you understand and narrow in on this requirement and the subsequent hardware needed.

 

I also have my ubuntu VM's hitting it via SMB as well just for ease, I have no need to go the NFS route for what I am doing. Everything has been rock solid for over a year, and I am extremely happy with the setup.

 

Now, onto the freenas forum. This single thread is a huge wealth of info and I seriously advise you read it be fore you do literally anything else. Especially the bits where Stux goes into the hows and whys of freenas virtualization, I really did learn a lot and it cut through a lot of the bullshit you may encounter out on the interwebz. Link here: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/build-report-node-304-x10sdv-tln4f-esxi-freenas-aio.57116/

 

At that point, thats about all I can personally do for you. I am sure there are folks on here who can help as well, but I would also start posting over there as those guys really are great. You will see I have posted all over that particular thread.

 

Good luck!!

[Windows7ge]

25 minutes ago, pguerra75 said:

My idea was to run freeNas to essentially control the drives and to run as a VM manager.

FreeNAS uses Bhyve as a hypervisor and it's far from good for any production application

26 minutes ago, pguerra75 said:

would this still receive the ram cache benefits from ZFS?

If you mean hosting a file share within the Windows VM? No it wouldn't.

 

29 minutes ago, pguerra75 said:

I guess my main concerns are, will I be shooting myself in the foot by running the shares off the windows server inside of the VM?

Not necessarily. It isn't uncommon to virtualize an OS like this although usually you'd install a Windows Feature package like HyperV or VMWare for Workstation so as to keep Windows as the host and enable virtualization support. You may prefer to look into ESXi if you want a hypervisor as a host.

 

33 minutes ago, pguerra75 said:

Does freeNas offsite backup include the VMs?

If you did this you would have to specify them to be in the backup. It won't do it automatically.

 

35 minutes ago, pguerra75 said:

Assigning it 2 10 gig nics

FreeNAS(Bhyve) is not capable of this. You can assign the VM those networks but you cannot pass-though the NIC.

 

If you want ZFS you can explore PROXMOX. From here you could enable containers and setup network shares. These would work off the RAM cache.

 

Unfortunately I don't believe there's any direct way for clients to use the Windows services but get the accelerated function ZFS read caching offers. Perhaps @Electronics Wizardy can offer more information or a better solution.

[leadeater]

46 minutes ago, pguerra75 said:

My idea was to run freeNas to essentially control the drives and to run as a VM manager.

FreeNAS is not a good hypervisor to run important business VMs on.

 

Much simpler to just use ESXi free license and a hardware RAID card with BBU. Then create VMs on top of the ESXi datastore.

[Nick7]

As I see it, if you want to keep functionality of what Windows has for shares, and indeed want to keep it there - just use standalone server with drives in it using Storage Spaces for disk management, and possibly even have VM's on it under Hyper V.

 

Seeing you intend to have 2x10G links for shares, I would suggest against running Windows server under VM, as there's always penalty for running VM's, especially with 10G networks - so for that, keep it bare metal.

 

Others already mentioned that FreeNAS is not best solution for virtualization, while it's great for serving as NAS.

 

If you intend to have 2 servers, and find FreeNAS good enough for shares, have one server for that and another for VM's, which can run either Windows with HyperV, or something like Proxmox... even ESXi, why not?

 

It all boils down to your requirements and budget.

[pguerra75]

First, thank all of you for your responses, not exactly what I wanted to hear, but certainly what I needed to. Got a bit of work ahead of me.