Hello everyone, Wanted to get some help in regards to freenas zvol iscsi and xenserver vms.
My question is what would the better or proper way to have vm storage on freenas using iscsi. Right now i have one xcp-ng server running 6 vm’s using local storage. Can i make 1 large zvol (1TB) to use as an extent for all my vm’s or should i make a zvol and extent for each vm.
Also I have a 10g card on both systems with a static ip on each connected with a dac cable. I t is the same setup that tom used in his explaining how to use freenas iscsi with xcp-ng
You can do this either way. If you don’t have any storage organised for your VMs you’ll want to create your device extent for XCP-ng to connect to. If you want to then create a separate extent for other VM storage, you can do this too. A point to mention is that in your VMs all the disks are included in your backup schedule by default, so this is something to consider.
Example: I stood up a deployment server for a client that had multiple disks, one of which was for WSUS. The boot and deployment disks lived on an iSCSI SR, but the disk that housed the WSUS content lived on an iSCSI disk that’s initiated by the VM instead of XCP-ng. That way we could exclude the WSUS content from the backup schedule.
Ok, so currently i have a vm for Unifi, Hassio, Hassio Dev, Xen Orchestra, Media center (organizr,sonarr,plex,etc), Dashboard monitor (influx,telegraf,graphana, etc) and on the media vm i have a nfs share mounted from freenas. Would I make zvol for each vm to use as an extent or make one large zvol for an extent then attach all my vm to it. Also if I backup the media center vm will it allso try to backup the nfs share attached to it or would i have to find some other way to backup that vm without backing up the share since it is already on my freenas server
One large zvol and attach it to XCP-ng, your VM disks can go there. Unless you have obscenely large VM disk sizes, at which point I’d set up separate extents for those VMs and connect them from the guest OS directly.
@LTS_Tom do you have a video talking about device vs file extents in FreeNAS that OP could reference?
If your NFS mounts are on another box they wouldn’t be included in XO backup jobs.
Thank for the info. I will go with the large zvol. My largest vm is the media center (240g) which hosts my plex server along with other docker containers in a one node swarm.
1 Like