FreeBSD hosting Windows VM Locally

J

joelmusicman

Hello all,

First post here; I've used FreeNAS for about a year but I'm thinking about converting both my FreeNAS box and my Windows machine into one physical machine. I love the many features of ZFS which is why I'm so interested in the idea.

Currently the FreeNAS box is a G3220 on an Asrock e3c224 itx board; the windows machine is a 3570K (non-ECC). I'm considering going all the way to a Xeon E5 class machine (probably v2 though as DDR4 ram is still hideously expensive).

Main workloads will be a MySQL database and testing automated stock market trading. I may eventually get into programming with R, but I'm squarely in the "novice" programming camp.

As far as I see it, there are two possibilities:
1. Install a lightweight Openbox, VirtualBox, and then just run Windows maximized (I have a dual screen setup if that matters).
2. PCI Passthrough - does that work with GPUs?
 
PCI passthrough is not available on VirtualBox, at least with a FreeBSD host. Windows runs pretty well in a VirtualBox VM. Graphics acceleration is... hm, the checkbox for 3D acceleration is now present. Windows games still might be a problem, but productivity programs will be fine. I'm not sure about combining NAS and desktop systems, though.

bhyve(8) does have PCI passthrough, but I have not tried it, and I don't think it runs Windows yet.
 
It's mostly just me using it, so my use of a "NAS" was really just for parity protection & serving videos to XBMC. Now that my needs (ok, wants!) are growing, I'm thinking of consolidating at the same time. Sounds like the OpenBox/Virtualbox route is the best COA.

I'm in the process of migrating all my data off the FreeNAS box right now; any issues with installing/configuring FreeBSD on the existing "NAS" hardware and later changing motherboard, CPU and GPU?
 
joelmusicman said:
any issues with installing/configuring FreeBSD on the existing "NAS" hardware and later changing motherboard, CPU and GPU?
Click to expand...

Nothing major. By default, FreeBSD is not compiled with processor-specific options, so moving to a different processor is not a problem. Sometimes network interface names need to be adjusted, like em0 rather than re0. Sometimes drive names change, but that can be avoided entirely by using labels. ZFS has its own labels, so that's not a problem. A different GPU might need drivers or to have xorg.conf adjusted.
 
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