Hello Everyone,

 For awhile now i've been wanting to run PFSense and FreeNAS on the same system and have the system act as the Main Router and NAS (i know that unRAID has a NAS function built in but i want RAID and ZFS support)  but i've been running into some issues like passing through a physical NIC to the PFSense VM (FreeNAS i'm not worried about) 

 

Hardware:

Xeon E5 1650

8GB DDR3 ECC

1 Dual Intel NIC

one onboard NIC

and a Realtek NIC

(so a total of 4 NICs)

 

Any Suggestions?

 

Edited March 15, 20179 yr by NetworkNoob

1 hour ago, NetworkNoob said:

Any Suggestions?

ESXI? Unraid as the hypervisor isn't a good fit for what you are trying to do.

12 hours ago, jonathanm said:

ESXI? Unraid as the hypervisor isn't a good fit for what you are trying to do.

Haven't thought of using ESXI thanks for the suggestion. ?

but it should work. 

running pfsense since 2 weeks with no problem with br0 as lan and one passthrough pcie intel Nic as wan. ( testing only. recommended bare matel installation I know ^^)

I also want to test a freenas vm with passed trought hdd´s. But I did not started yet.

Have only a small Desktop System with 3 HDDs at the moment. So the only way it would make sense for my system, is to passthrough all hdds but  noway to do so I think.

Best would be a pcie card to passthrough whole controller.

Or Proxmox. But don't want to miss unraid.

 

 

what exactly is your problem with passtrough?

 

you can just add it to syslinux.cfg and unraid would pass it on boot, so you could just select it in the vm edit page at the bottom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 9, 20179 yr by feraay

One of my servers runs pfsense as my firewall/router with a 4 port intel nic passed to the vm. No problems as long as you don't mind losing internet when the array goes off line (or have a backup in place like I do for those rare occasions.)

What intel NIC are you using?  I had problems passing through one of the older 82575EB cards - as soon as I switched to the newer i350-T2 it worked perfectly straightaway

yesterday I tested freenas on top of that. at the moment only with vdisk this is really bad and don't make sense to use. 

 

But Freenas is running pfsense is running just have to passtrought some hdds and it should be fine. 

 

We will see. 

 

Everyone says the best way is to passthrough hba and lis but I can´t do so. would it make any difference for ZFS if I only passthrough hdds directly?

 

OK it would be bad passthrough only hdd.

 

So there is no way to work without a separate pcie sata controller right ?  

 

 

Read a bit more about that. So I need a 200 Dollar LSI Card to Passtrought for real?   thats heavy.

Edited May 10, 20179 yr by feraay

2 hours ago, feraay said:

yesterday I tested freenas on top of that. at the moment only with vdisk this is really bad and don't make sense to use. 

 

But Freenas is running pfsense is running just have to passtrought some hdds and it should be fine. 

 

We will see. 

 

Everyone says the best way is to passthrough hba and lis but I can´t do so. would it make any difference for ZFS if I only passthrough hdds directly?

 

OK it would be bad passthrough only hdd.

 

So there is no way to work without a separate pcie sata controller right ?  

 

 

Read a bit more about that. So I need a 200 Dollar LSI Card to Passtrought for real?   thats heavy.

 

I did an HDD "passthrough" with ESXi in the past (to NAS4Free but FreeNAS would not be different in that regard). You need to create an RDM via SSH (or with a keyboard and Monitor but I don't think you want to type that shit). I did hours of research and getting it to work, but sadly I can't find the guide I followed anymore. But I found this (https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1017530) on the vmware KB, but I don't know if it is going to work because when I still used ESXi it didn't existed yet.

 

But it was a real pain in the ass and there were problems all over the place, but eventually I got NAS4Free and pfSense running on the same machine for around a year before I switched to unRAID because I wanted to add more (redundant) storage and that is not easily possible with NAS4Free. Today I got pfSense going on unRAID and it works fine (although you need to make a few tweaks in the config, e.g. disabling Hardware Checksum Offloading and sadly it does not work with the unRAID trial because then you need an internet connection to start the array and the array has to be started for the pfSense VM to run and providing internet access to unRAID  ).

13 hours ago, DZMM said:

What intel NIC are you using?  I had problems passing through one of the older 82575EB cards - as soon as I switched to the newer i350-T2 it worked perfectly straightaway

 

 

Dell R886R Intel Pro 1000 VT Quad Port

2 hours ago, 1812 said:

 

 

Dell R886R Intel Pro 1000 VT Quad Port

Sorry that was meant for the OP!

That means a simple hdd passthrough is not enough for stable ZFS?

 

I set the vdisk path to /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD30EFRX-68EUZN0_WD-WCC4N7Ve23a. So he grabs the whole HDD.

 

I read so much different stories the last days. I unterstand that the best method is to passthrough a hba. So it will be like bare metal installation.

But in FreeNAS Forum they say for home use small machine it would be ok to do a vm without hba passthrough. So that is what I want so use it for.

 

For this use Case they say to have redundant storage is the best way. Means do a raid before setup VM. But on the other site they say its not recommended to to a raid with ZFS but this only meant for a HBA passtrought? 

 

Its a bit confusing to be honest.

 

 

 

 

Edited May 11, 20179 yr by feraay