As part of ongoing interoperability testing with ESX Server, I tested running FreeNAS (version 0.65) on ESX Server 2.5.3 today. Since FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD (which VMware states is a supported guest operating system for ESX Server), I didn’t really expect any major surprises. I was wrong.
Basically, I couldn’t make it work. Despite trying both the BusLogic SCSI adapter (the default) and the LSI Logic adapter, the FreeNAS distribution wouldn’t see the virtualized SCSI hard disks, and therefore I could never install FreeNAS to the hard disk for use. Without the XML configuration file on a read/write media, FreeNAS lost its settings (such as the IP address or the network interface to use) every time it rebooted.
It’s odd that FreeBSD, a supported guest OS, didn’t appear to work, yet I was able to make OpenBSD (an unsupported guest OS) run without any major problems.
Anyone have any tips for making FreeNAS 0.65 work under VMware ESX Server?
Tags: BSD, ESX, NAS, Virtualization, VMware
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