Install NAS4Free on top of virtualization engine

[georgedone]

Just bought a SUPERMICRO X9SCV-Q Mini-ITX motherboard and a Core i5 2540M CPU. Still having only 4GB RAM at the moment but planning to upgrade to max. 16GB when monies will be less tight.
The system will be primarily used for NAS4Free with 4 x 2.5 inch HDD, but I would like to be able to run if needed some other guest OSes alongside for testing, etc.
I'm looking forward for your suggestions, is it feasible to run Nas4Free on top of a hypervisor ? (and present the disks to be used by Nas4Free as RawDevices from hypervisor) What would you recommend ESXi, VirtualBox, BHyve ? Any experiences worth to share ?

[00Roush]

I have been testing NAS4Free in ESXi 5.0/5.1 VM on and off for about a year now without much trouble. If possible I would not use raw device mapping but instead use PCI pass thru for the disk controller. Especially if your data is important or you plan to use ZFS.

I recommend using ESXi as it supports PCI pass thru and FreeBSD as a guest os. Originally I had issues doing PCI pass thru on my supermicro X9SCM-F motherboard. ESXi 5.1 had a bug that crashed the system when PCI pass thru was enabled. Then ran into issues because once onboard SATA controller was setup with PCI pass thru my Asmedia 1061 SATA card would no longer work. Got that ironed out by adding PCI id to a config file and things have been good.

For reference here is my hardware setup:
Xeon E3-1230 CPU
Supermicro X9SCM-F Motherboard
16GB Kingston ValueRAM ECC
SYBA SY-PEX40039 SATA controller card (Asmedia ASM1061 chipset)
4GB SanDisk USB Flash drive (ESXi 5.1)
120 GB SDD (PNY Prevail Elite) (ESXi datastore)
3 x 1TB Hitachi (7K1000.C)
Intel PRO/1000 PT Dual port Server NIC

OS setup:
NAS4Free 9.1.0.847 in a ESXi VM (4GB RAM, Intel chipset SATA passthru to VM, Intel NIC passthru to VM)
3 x 1TB RAIDZ1
Samba settings: Send Buffer Size = 0, Receive Buffer Size = 0, SMB2, all others default.
ZFS kernel tune extension installed and set to 4GB RAM

CIFS transfers max out gigabit at about 112 MB /sec.

Hope that helps.
00Roush

[georgedone]

Thanks a lot 00Roush for your comments. It is daunting to hear you ran into bugs which took a lot of experimentation which seem to be far above my experience level with ESXi. I do not plan to use ZFS, at least not until I afford more than 4GB RAM, but of course I value the data and do not fancy the idea losing it in a random crash, especially since it had been rock-solid until now (without ESXi) of Most likely I will give up, but before a final decision would be interested to know if you ran Full or Embedded Nas4Free version ? Did you pass-through to Nas4Free VM both the intel SATA and the Asmedia SATA ?
Regards,
George

[00Roush]

Testing was a bit of a pain as I am not all that familiar with ESXi either. Turns out asmedia controller is not specially supported in ESXi but would work when achi driver loaded for Intel sata. Once I found the solution it wasn't too difficult to add. Now achi driver loads for asmedia card (2 ports) and I can use it with ssd datastore in ESXi. Intel SATA (6 ports) is being passed directly to vm.

I have tested both embedded and full version of NAS4Free in VM. Both work just fine. Currently testing full version as it appeared to have lower CPU usage in VM. Haven't actually verified that though.

Have you tested ESXi out yet with NAS4Free? ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 update 1 work good. No more broken pass through in 5.1. So I only have to do 10 or so commands at the command line and add one line to a file using vi to get asmedia card to show up in ESXi.

00Roush