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SEKCobra posted:everyone else can't do the NAS part. Everything you're trying to do has been possible for years, so I'm betting you're not explaining the use case completely.
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 14:14 |
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# ? May 8, 2024 21:24 |
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H2SO4 posted:Everything you're trying to do has been possible for years, so I'm betting you're not explaining the use case completely. There are 5 HDDs in this PC and I want to use them in a NAS configuration while at the same time having VMs running on the CPU. Nothing I tried is able to do that while also providing proper VMs. Hyper-V can't do USB passthrough, VMware can't do anything with the HDDs, the FreeNAS VM stuff is horrible and probably can't do USB passthrough anyway etc.
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 14:46 |
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SEKCobra posted:There are 5 HDDs in this PC and I want to use them in a NAS configuration while at the same time having VMs running on the CPU. Nothing I tried is able to do that while also providing proper VMs. Hyper-V can't do USB passthrough, VMware can't do anything with the HDDs, the FreeNAS VM stuff is horrible and probably can't do USB passthrough anyway etc. How is the NAS set up now? Why does VMWare have to be able to do anything to the hard drives?
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 15:21 |
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The Nards Pan posted:How is the NAS set up now? Why does VMWare have to be able to do anything to the hard drives? Because VMWare has to run on the same hardware as the NAS OS, so one option would have been to just expose the HDDs to a VM
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 15:28 |
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SEKCobra posted:Run a NAS on the same machine as a Hypervisor.
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 15:28 |
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Erwin posted:Why? Just present the drives to a VM running FreeNAS or whatever. VMWare won't let me pas them through, probably because of drivers or w/e.
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 15:44 |
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Have you considered converting the hard drives to vmdk and attaching them through VMware instead of a straight pass through? Are they all separate disks right now or an array?
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 15:50 |
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So to be clear, you're wanting to use a Windows workstation as a client PC as well as a VM host? That shrinks your options dramatically.
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 15:52 |
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Are those actual internal HDDs or HDDs connected through USB? You could just directly attach the disks to the VM running your FreeNAS instance with Hyper-V.
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 15:52 |
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You really don't want to do FreeNAS in a VM unless you're passing the actual controller through to the VM. Passing disks through is risky, especially if you're passing through VMDKs/VHDs/etc and not the raw disk.
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 16:08 |
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I've got SATA HDDs connected to the mobo and I need the VMs to be able to use some (other) USB devices.
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 18:32 |
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I have an esxi box under my desk right now that's set up the way you want I think. The key is having 2 sata controllers, my motherboard has an asmedia esata port on the back that I pass back into the case which is what I boot off and I pass the intel controller with 6 drives to a linux vm. Also I have a pcie usb 3 card and a 2nd video card I can pass to any vm. I complicate things even further and do raid and iscsi in the linux vm and pass that back to esxi. Perplx fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Jul 13, 2017 |
# ? Jul 13, 2017 18:44 |
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Perplx posted:I have an esxi box under my desk right now that's set up the way you want I think. The key is having 2 sata controllers, my motherboard has an asmedia esata port on the back that I pass back into the case which is what I boot off and I pass the intel controller with 6 drives to a linux vm. Also I have a pcie usb 3 card and a 2nd video card I can pass to any vm. Well while trying to set it up with VMWare I was also considering putting the other VMs onto the NAS inside the VMWare
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 19:14 |
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It seems like bare-metal Linux with KVM can meet your NAS and hypervisor requirements. Pass through your GPU and a USB controller for your desktop VM and you'll be set. Right tool for the job and whatnot.
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# ? Jul 13, 2017 20:32 |
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SEKCobra posted:I've got SATA HDDs connected to the mobo and I need the VMs to be able to use some (other) USB devices. You can pass through the SATA HDD's using RDMs. ESXI by default doesn't support this for SATA devices afaik but it can be done using the commandline which I had to do when I virtualized my nas. http://www.homecomputerlab.com/vmware-sata-disk-raw-device-mapping-rdm You can also add a USB controller to the VM and pass through USB devices to the guest.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 02:39 |
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SamDabbers posted:It seems like bare-metal Linux with KVM can meet your NAS and hypervisor requirements. Pass through your GPU and a USB controller for your desktop VM and you'll be set. Right tool for the job and whatnot. Not as much fun as a ESXi box booting headless, starting a VM with a controller passed through which exports iscsi back to ESXi from ZFS, then running a desktop on top of that with a passthrough GPU and USB kb/mouse, because VMware is the only hypervisor in the world
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 02:49 |
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my head
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 03:07 |
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evol262 posted:Not as much fun as a ESXi box booting headless, starting a VM with a controller passed through which exports iscsi back to ESXi from ZFS, then running a desktop on top of that with a passthrough GPU and USB kb/mouse, because VMware is the only hypervisor in the world Well it has no systemd cancer which is a plus.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 03:07 |
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theperminator posted:Well it has no systemd cancer which is a plus. I think my facetiousness was missed, but kvm works fine on Solaris if you really hate systemd for whatever reason.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 04:12 |
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theperminator posted:Well it has no systemd cancer which is a plus. The only Linux user group meet up I went to was ruined by an octogenarian neck beard who refused to shut the gently caress up about systemd and his precious bespoke init scripts, to the point that we got kicked out of the coffee shop we were in for being too rowdy. BallerBallerDillz fucked around with this message at 04:19 on Jul 14, 2017 |
# ? Jul 14, 2017 04:16 |
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evol262 posted:I think my facetiousness was missed, but kvm works fine on Solaris if you really hate systemd for whatever reason. KVM works great on Illumos, but it doesn't support PCI passthrough yet. The Joyent folks don't need it, so they didn't implement it.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 04:20 |
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theperminator posted:You can pass through the SATA HDD's using RDMs. ESXI by default doesn't support this for SATA devices afaik but it can be done using the commandline which I had to do when I virtualized my nas. I tried to put an Areca controller in but apparently my hardware doesn't support any PCI passthrough.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 08:47 |
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SEKCobra posted:I tried to put an Areca controller in but apparently my hardware doesn't support any PCI passthrough. What do you mean by Areca controller? If you mean SATA controller you don't need to do that (though it is better) you can just pass the disks through following the guide in that link.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 11:00 |
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theperminator posted:What do you mean by Areca controller? If you mean SATA controller you don't need to do that (though it is better) you can just pass the disks through following the guide in that link.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 14:03 |
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Vulture Culture posted:Areca makes RAID cards. Ahh right that makes sense, you'd be able to pass the RDM of the whole volume but that just feels wrong to me. I wonder if he just needs to turn on VT-d in the bios to allow the pass through?
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 14:49 |
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theperminator posted:Ahh right that makes sense, you'd be able to pass the RDM of the whole volume but that just feels wrong to me. That's the thing, apparently my Z77 motzherboard doesn't have VT-d and I also read that Intel K processors don't support it at all.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 15:27 |
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SEKCobra posted:That's the thing, apparently my Z77 motzherboard doesn't have VT-d and I also read that Intel K processors don't support it at all. Look up your CPU on Intel's ARK system. It'll tell you what it supports. You may be right for Sandy/Ivy Bridge, I checked the top K-series processors of those generations and they all seem to lack VT-D while their non-K siblings have it. My 4790K has VT-D so it's not all K-series though.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 15:42 |
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SEKCobra posted:That's the thing, apparently my Z77 motzherboard doesn't have VT-d and I also read that Intel K processors don't support it at all. Ahh right I had the same problem with my Z77 system. You can still pass through the raid volume using the guide I posted though.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 15:43 |
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SEKCobra posted:That's the thing, apparently my Z77 motzherboard doesn't have VT-d and I also read that Intel K processors don't support it at all.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 16:40 |
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anthonypants posted:So maybe use a different motherboard/processor combo for your virtualization project? Ah yes, let me just buy new hardware for my hardware repurpose project!
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 17:00 |
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You could just run VMware workstation instead of some cobbled together thing that will implode with the next os update.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 17:11 |
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SEKCobra posted:Ah yes, let me just buy new hardware for my hardware repurpose project!
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 17:14 |
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SEKCobra posted:Ah yes, let me just buy new hardware for my hardware repurpose project! Sometimes the hardware you want to repurpose isn't a good choice for what you want to do with it. VT-D is a requirement for high performance hardware passthrough.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 17:22 |
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theperminator posted:You can pass through the SATA HDD's using RDMs. ESXI by default doesn't support this for SATA devices afaik but it can be done using the commandline which I had to do when I virtualized my nas. I have a few disks passed through via RDM to a Windows VM on my whitebox ESXi host at home. Windows sees the disks as regular hard drives and can pull SMART info without any issues. If I didn't have the ability to pass through an entire controller (in IT mode) to a NAS VM, I would go the RDM route.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 17:25 |
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anthonypants posted:Good, I'm glad you've agreed that it's your hardware's fault and not your virtualization platform. Man you really got me good, me claiming that VMWare is at fault for this not working. OH WAIT.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 17:35 |
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Man, I'm not going to lie, this multi-day discussion has been really frustrating to read. You lack one or more of the following 3 to achieve what you're trying to do. 1) Software 2) Hardware 3) Knowledge. I'm not making an argument for any specifics and I'm not trying to insult you. It's just painful to watch you bang your head against the wall.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 18:27 |
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Not sure which software I could be missing since I've tried most of the big hvs, and how was I supposed to know beforehand that this mobo and cpu didnt support a specific feature to do this fairly odd task? Both Virtualization and/or NASing work fine on their own. I'm sorry if my questions are annoying but I usually only deal with VMs on purpose built machines where you dont have to deal with this silly stuff. I will try the commandline hdd passthrough stuff when I get a chance.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 19:39 |
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SEKCobra posted:Both Virtualization and/or NASing work fine on their own. I am very much a novice as far as professional virtualization goes so I might be reaching too far with this statement, but I think the key is that you don't usually have the same device doing both of these in serious enterprise setups - you have your SAN for storage and your compute nodes may have a bit of local storage, but they're not intended to themselves be serving as network storage for other nodes. You can definitely do it with Linux/KVM because you're using a full featured OS with its own optional NAS features available as a hypervisor, but something like Hyper-V or ESXi is fundamentally not meant as an OS for a shared storage device.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 20:43 |
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Moey posted:I have a few disks passed through via RDM to a Windows VM on my whitebox ESXi host at home. Windows sees the disks as regular hard drives and can pull SMART info without any issues. That's cool! I didn't know it passed through SMART info. SEKCobra posted:Not sure which software I could be missing since I've tried most of the big hvs, and how was I supposed to know beforehand that this mobo and cpu didnt support a specific feature to do this fairly odd task? I gave you the answer for ESXI with the exact commands. PCI pass through is not required.
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# ? Jul 14, 2017 23:21 |
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# ? May 8, 2024 21:24 |
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RDM supports SMART huh? I need to look into that. I'm moving shortly and would like to reduce the number of machines I have running, if possible. My storage server is way overpowered, so I could probably virtualize all the things on it with 12 cores and 144 GB ram, if RDM works reliably or I can pass through the LSI9211 to a VM reliably. Could connect some SSDs to the on board sata controller too.
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# ? Jul 15, 2017 03:30 |