Freenas VM problems

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
#1

Hello, I have some problems with Freenas I have, I want to install a windows 10 test VM for an project on Freenas. The Freenas Server is build on an old Xeon L5630 and 24GB of RAM and six 100GB HDDs and an 60GB SSD. Everytime i want do start the VM I get this error:

“Error: Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 161, in call_method
result = await self.middleware.call_method(self, message)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 1043, in call_method
return await self._call(message[‘method’], serviceobj, methodobj, params, app=app, io_thread=False)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/main.py”, line 983, in _call
return await methodobj(*args)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/schema.py”, line 664, in nf
return await f(*args, **kwargs)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/plugins/vm.py”, line 1132, in start
await self._manager.start(vm)
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/plugins/vm.py”, line 61, in start
list(done)[0].result()
File “/usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/middlewared/plugins/vm.py”, line 315, in run
raise CallError(f’VM {self.vm[“name”]} failed to start: {output}’)
middlewared.service_exception.CallError: [EFAULT] VM test failed to start: vm_create: Device not configured”

All BIOS settings are correct I had checked them five times but i can´t find any problems there.

Does somebody have any idea how I may fix that issue?

Kind regards from Germany

Patrick

#2

Even though FreeNAS “supports” VMs, It’s a mixed bag. Personally I’ve always seen less than ideal results. AFAIK it’s a recent addition to FreeNAS and has quite a few bugs. I understand it would be convenient to throw a VM on a server you already use for storage, and the FreeNAS implementation I’m sure will improve in the future. But if you really want to make use of virtualization right now, your best bet is a type 1 (bare metal) hypervisor like XCP-ng, Citrix XenServer, or VMware ESXi. Alternatively, if you don’t want to, or can’t dedicate a whole machine to virtualization, you could use a type 2 (hosted) hypervisor like KVM or Proxmox for Linux, and Hyper-V for Windows. And of course there’s tons of straight software options like VirtualBox, or VMware Player.

If you want to go the bare-metal route, I’ve seen a number of people running FreeNAS itself as a VM with good results. So you would have the flexibility of a virtualization server without losing the NAS you know and love.

2 Likes
#3

Thanks for the help. My exact problem is that I want to build myself an all NVMe flash storage but i dont want to waste so much CPU power only for a storage server. For the virtualization part of my lab I have some ESXi, Hyper-V and some Proxmox servers thats not the problem at all.

It would be nice to use the left CPU power of that server but whatever thanks for your help.

Kind regards patrick