How To Install Windows 2012 Server On Freenas 11 Vmax
How To Install Windows 2012 Server On Freenas 11 Vms
How To Install Windows 2012 Server On Freenas 11 Vmware

It runs some windows only software (mainly Blue Iris). If you're just testing, then by all means jump into the FreeNAS 10 beta and use bhyve, it supports Windows VM's. You can just spin up a Windows 10 VM without having a license and it will work indefinitely, just with some customisation features stripped out. Install FreeNAS. Double click on the FreeNAS VM to start booting it up. Select Install/Upgrade then OK. Select the first hard disk by pressing Space then press OK. Say Yes to the warning message about erasing data on the drive. Enter the root password. Select Boot via BIOS. Wait for the install to finish. Click OK on the succeeded message.

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This guide will show you how to create a FreeNAS VM with VMware Fusion and configure it to work with ESXi so that you can test features like VMotion in your virtual lab. We will also setup multipathing and make sure failover works when an iSCSI NIC or switch fails.

Overview

In this tutorial, we will use VMware Fusion* to demonstrate how FreeNAS and ESXi can be configured in a production environment.

We will configure the iSCSI networks so that there are multiple redundant paths from the ESXi host to the FreeNAS server. This will allow VMs located on the FreeNAS datastore to stay running when an iSCSI switch or network adapter fails.

The diagram below shows the network topology we will setup.

Notice if we take out the switch labeled iscsi-1, there is still a path from esxi01 to the freenas server. We will demonstrate this at the end by disabling an iscsi network adapter on either the ESXi or FreeNAS VM.

Prerequisites

Since we will be using nested virtualization to run ESXi inside a VM, you’ll need a modern Mac which has a CPU that supports hardware virtualizaion and has at least 16 GB of RAM. You’ll also need to download and install VMware Fusion* because it allows the hardware assisted virtualization feature of the CPU to be used in a virtual machine.

The following steps have been tested on a 2017 MacBook Pro that has 16 GB of RAM running macOS Catalina and VMware Fusion 11.5*.

Software required for this tutorial:

VMware Fusion 11.5 - You can purchase it from the VMware Store* or download the free trial.
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7 or 7.0 - You can get it by purchasing the vSphere Essentials Kit* or by downloading the free trial.
FreeNAS-11.3 - You can download it for free from here.

Okay, so you’ve got a modern Mac, installed VMware Fusion* and downloaded FreeNAS and ESXi, we’re now ready to create the custom VMware Fusion networks then build our FreeNAS VM.

Create VMware Fusion Custom Networks

In the following steps we will be using VMware Fusion Pro* to configure three custom networks. If you haven’t got the professional version, you can edit the config file to create the networks. See this tutorial to learn how.

Click VMware Fusion, Preferences then click the Network tab. Click the lock icon so that you can make changes then click on the + to add a new custom network. Call it vSphere, enable NAT, disable DHCP and assign the Subnet IP as 10.1.1.0.

Create another called iscsi-1 with NAT disabled and a Subnet IP of 10.10.1.0.

Notice the networks we just created have the same names and subnets as the switches in the network diagram in the overview.

If we were to set this topology up in production, the custom networks would be the physical switches. However, you’d probably only use two switches and configure the iSCSI networks so they use VLANS.

Create FreeNAS VM

Okay, that’s the network configured. Let’s create the FreeNAS VM by following the steps below:

Open VMware Fusion*, click File then New…
Select Create a custom virtual machine then click Continue.
Choose Other, FreeBSD 11 64-Bit then click Continue.
Select Legacy BIOS then click Continue.
Select Create a new virtual disk then click Continue.
Click Customize Settings.
Choose a location to save the VM, enter a name, e.g freenas and click Save.

After clicking Save the VM should be created and the Settings screen will load.

From here we need to configure the virtual hardware before powering on the VM for the first time. We will assign more memory, add an extra network adapter, attach the FreeNAS ISO, and configure the network adapters to use the custom VMware Fusion networks we created at the start.

Configure Processor & Memory

Click Processors & Memory.
For the Processor assign 2 processor cores.
For Memory assign 8192 MB (8 GB).
Click Show All to save processor and memory settings.

Configure Network Adapters

Click on the Network Adapter.
Connect the Network Adapter to the Custom Network vSphere.
Click Add Device…
Select Network Adapter then click Add…
Connect the Network Adapter to the Custom Network iscsi-1.
Repeat steps 3, 4 and 5, choosing iscsi-2 for the third adapter.

Add Extra Storage

We need to add at least one more extra hard disk to the VM that will be used to create the FreeNAS storage pool. FreeNAS will be installed on the first disk and data will be installed on the extra disks. For this tutorial we will create two extra 40 GB disks and we will configure them later as a mirror volume.

Click Add Device…
Select New Hard Disk then click Add…
Change the disk size to 40 GB then click Apply.
Repeat steps 1 to 3 so that you have two 40 GB hard disks.

Connect FreeNAS ISO

The last thing we need to do before we can power the VM on is attach the FreeNAS ISO with the following steps.

Click CD/DVD (IDE).
Tick the Connect CD/DVD Drive box.
Select Choose disk or a disc image…, browse to the FreeNAS ISO located on your Mac then click Open.

Close the Settings screen. We’re now ready to install FreeNAS.

Install FreeNAS

Double click on the FreeNAS VM to start booting it up.

Select Install/Upgrade then OK.

Select the first hard disk by pressing Space then press OK.

Say Yes to the warning message about erasing data on the drive.

Enter the root password.

Select Boot via BIOS.

Wait for the install to finish.

How To Install Windows 2012 Server On Freenas 11 Vm

Click OK on the succeeded message.

Select Reboot System then OK.

FreeNAS will reboot to the console setup screen.

Configure FreeNAS Management Network

From the console setup screen, you will notice the IP address is 0.0.0.0. This is because we are using a custom VMware Fusion network that doesn’t have DHCP enabled. In the following steps, we will assign a static IP address so we can connect to the web user interface.

Go through the op

How To Install Windows 2012 Server On Freenas 11 Vm