How-To: FreeNAS SAN on ESXi

Just a quick how-to, as a follow-up to my last post.

1. Add Disks (Disks>Mgmt), add 2 (RAID1), or add 3+(RAID5).
2. Format the disks you just created (Disks>Format, Choose the 1st disk, set the FileSystem to SoftwareRAID, click Format, Disks>Format, Choose the 2nd disk, set the FileSystem to SoftwareRAID, click Format).
3. Create RAID Level (Disks>Software RAID> RAID1, Select both disks created in step)
4. Format the RAID as an EXT2 file system (if you don't do this, you're going to get an error when you create the mount point. VMware ESXi will want the EXT2 filesystem... but you can then format it after it's been mounted to whatever you want. This includes if you're just adding storage capacity to a Windows system and using the initiator to mount this as a mount point. It's easiest to format the RAID EXT2 initially, and then do whatever you want later).
5. Create a mount point (Disks>Mount Point, MBR1 type, and records your mount point .. e.g. /dev/mirror/Raids1).
6. Unmount RAID if need be (Disks>Mount Point>Mgmt Tools>Tools tab, unmount).
7. Add the iSCSI target (Services>iSCSI>Add New Extent, Skip the Device, Add New Target)
8. Now you can mount this target on a Windows Server (Download and Install Microsoft iSCSI Initiator, Discovery Tab, add the IP address of the FreeNAS serverm... Computer, Manage, Delete the new partition that is now visible, and create a new NTFS partition, and Quick format it).

Using FreeNAS as a SAN for an ESXi demo

I recently had to do a virtualization demo for a client. The need was to show a particular application stack running under ESXi, using storage mounted from a SAN. This all needed to be portable, inexpensive, and completed quickly. The requirements limited me to stuff I could find quickly, and that would work. As such, I really only considered FreeNAS, OpenFiler, and Windows Storage Server since they were all readily available.

I ended-up using FreeNAS, and was actually quite impressed. FreeNAS runs the FreeBSD distribution, and interestily, like pfSense (another favorite of mine), it too is based on Monowall. What worked really well for me, was that FreeNAS is downloadable as an ESX virtual machine - which meant I could just download it and run as a VM inside an existing ESXi host. After getting it fired-up on "serverA", I stepped through the base configuration, got some storage carved out and exposed via iSCSI, and then just mounted it up inside a different ESXi machine (serverB). After doing do, I was able to copy my pre-configured VM's to the newly created datastore. I fired up my VM sessions on "serverA", they used the FreeNAS storage provided from serverB, and I had my portable demo environment. I'll follow-up with the steps I used to setup and expose the storage.