Beginner Question - VM for RAID

[Timothory]

Hi LTT community,
I'm about to build my first home server that will hold multiple VM for all kind of stuff :
- NAS (FreeNAS)
- Local cloud (owncloud)
- Routeur (PfSense)
- Windows + security software (managing multiple wireless camera in the house)

 

I would need a little bit of help to understand some of the concept related to virtualization.

 

First, I understand that you need to install an Hypervisor (sort of main OS that's taking care of all the VM)
Do you have any recommendations for a beginner (Esxi, unraid) ?

 

Then I would like all my VMs to access and to write on my RAID storage.
But my RAID will be created from the FreeNAS VM using ZFS technology.

 

Is it possible to create a RAID using a specific VM and to share it across multiple VM ?

Thank you.

[Windows7ge]

There's a couple of things you could do here. You could use FreeNAS as the host OS and install VMware on that. This should let you use ZFS and distribute storage across the VMs as needed.

 

Alternatively you could look into a OS called PROXMOX. It's a free virtualization OS. It supports ZFS so you could still allocate storage to the VM's from the RAID with the benefits of ZFS but I'm not certain it has the features of a NAS. I'm also not certain it's a good idea to virtualize FreeNAS. Can you? Yes. It should work but I'm not sure how good of an idea that is.

 

Personally if you want a NAS for home or a workplace and need a VM server with storage for each VM it might be in your best interest to keep both separate.

[Mikensan]

Base OS should be a real hypervisor such as ESXi - I think it's the easiest and friendliest to use personally.

You'll need a dedicated HBA for the disks to assign to a VM (FreeNAS / whatever). Something like a lsi 9211-8i / ibm m1015.

I'd highly suggest some local storage in a mirror'd raid to put the actual FreeNAS VM on, and maybe enough space for a couple VMs (management/critical VMs)

Then you would share out FreeNAS storage via iSCSI (NFS requires sync writes, thus needs SSD cache (slog)) to ESXi.

 

After that just create VMs willy nilly.

 

As for raid types - for purely VMs I would suggest Raid 10, but in a mixed environment you can get away with RaidZ1 / RaidZ2 (Raid 5 / Raid 6). Don't let people scare you away from Raid 5 - it's perfectly fine in a home lab with backups.

[Timothory]

Thank you guys,

I really appreciate, I will look deeper into both the solutions that you've mentioned. 

I will probably be back soon with more questions 

 

Thanks