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I'm looking into setting up a virtualization server at home. I have settled on hyper-v since I want to try remotefx.

What I'm contemplating is if it's possible to run freenas as a guest. Passthrough all my datadisks to the freenas guest and use the iscsi interface to expose lun:s from the guest to the hyper-v host for storage of all the other vm:s and data?

Ie, only the freenas vm is placed on storage handled by hyper-v server, all other vms are stored on luns handled by the freenas guest os?

Is it at all possible, is it a bad idea performance wise? Please give me your thoughts.

This way I get storage redundancy and all the freenas candy without setting up a separate hardware san or get a hw raid card.

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This way I get storage redundancy and all the freenas candy without setting up a separate hardware san or get a hw raid card.

You kinda get this, but only on paper. There's no advantage in doing it as your storage isn't really redundant and your performance can't be compared to a good RAID card.

The only scenario where you should look to do this is for training/lab purposes, as it gives you something to mess around with as a storage area network.

But for actually running stuff, you're better off serving the data straight up on Hyper-V to the guests.

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your performance is going to be twice as worse as normal for your other vm's, its no better than running software raid really

software raid is generally not great for disk intense tasks like running more than one vm

if this is a dev environment then sure you can get away with it but be aware of the performance pitfalls, generally always better to not virtualise storage where you can and use decent hardware raid

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Thank you all for your replies. It is both a lab/dev environment but I am planning of storing my important files on there too. Would I get worse performance from the virtualized freenas with the discs passthrough/native for the nas than I would If I ran it on separate dedicated hardware? Why Im contemplating it is because I dont want to invest in a hw raid card unless I really have to. – Molotch Aug 12 '11 at 10:50
yes purely because you need cpu time to virtualise your freenas, which needs to use cpu time to do its own internal software raid etc – anthonysomerset Aug 12 '11 at 12:41
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It's possible but if you only have one host why would't you just use the disks as storage provided to HV locally? Anything else will be slower and less stable.

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My understanding is that I either need to use a dedicated hardware raid card, intel matrix software raid on the host or use software raid on the vm:s (using two vhd on separate physical discs in raid 1 mode) to get redundancy. I thought I'd be clever if I used native disc access for a guest and use the guest as the software raid and get better performance and just one place to handle the raiding. – Molotch Aug 12 '11 at 11:44
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