N54L, ESX and FreeNAS

[ServerGuy]

I have been reading several forums and unless ive missed something i cant see any advice with the following

 

Have just brought one of these servers and 16GB ram upgrade, i want to run a few VM's but also FreeNAS for storage 

 

If i got a 16GB USB stick and Installed ESX and then created a 2GB VM on the usb stick with FreeNAS on would i then be able to directly connect to the onboard SATA Disks with FreeNAS

 

I can then configure up FreeNAS as a datastore for the other VMs

 

 

I realise in the event of a power failure i would have to bring up the FreeNAS before then powering on the remaining servers but that isnt an issue for homelab.

 

Any advice as from the FreeNAS forums there seems to be serious hesitancy about using RDM and as i cant see why this wouldnt work around that issue?

 

Thanks

[yodafett]

you can run esx on the 16 gb stick but VMware will not recognize the usb as a vmfs store,

[ServerGuy]

you can run esx on the 16 gb stick but VMware will not recognize the usb as a vmfs store,

 

Ok is there another way to do this? Server has yet to arrive - could i plug a SATA drive into the CD-ROM and run from there or is it on the same Controller as the Hard Disks?

 

Thanks

[ServerGuy]

Notice on the Specs it has a Esata Controller as well. Is this on a separate controller? Could i then do the following

 

Install ESX and a Virtual FreeNas Host on a disk connected to the Esata controller

Give FreeNas full control of the the SATA controller and disks?

 

 

Thanks

[yud]

Ok is there another way to do this? Server has yet to arrive - could i plug a SATA drive into the CD-ROM and run from there or is it on the same Controller as the Hard Disks?

 

Thanks

 

Be aware that officially FreeNAS is not supported on ESXi.

 

I did install it and it worked. However, when I had a question and posted it on the FreeNAS forums my post was deleted with the excuse "not supported".

 

So you may fiind yourself on your own if you come across problems.

 

EDIT:

I since removed FreeNAS and went with NFS on Ubuntu Server.

Edited October 11, 2014 by yud