FreeNAS vm on Ubuntu Server

[kingliam]

I've been searching the internet and this forum for the past couple days and I've hit a wall. I decided I needed to make a post to see if any of you could help me out. As a side note, I'm kind-of new to Ubuntu Server, so sorry in advance if any of these questions are basic. I also want to say THANKS to the author of this site. Its seriously amazing!

I'm trying to run FreeNAS 8 (x64) (which is based on FreeBSD) via VirtualBox 4.1 on Ubuntu Server 12.04. In going through this site's amazing tutorial, I ran into some issues running kvm's network bridge, so I decided to use VirtualBox which I'm more familiar with. I got ubuntu server and freeNAS up and running (freeNAS via VirtualBox). FreeNAS is really neat because once you get it running, you basically go and configure everything from your web browser by pointing to your vm's bridged network ip address. For those of you not familiar, FreeNAS, among many other things, allows you to configure a NAS drive on your network.

The problem I'm running into is this: I can't figure out how to get FreeNAS to access my logical volume partitions through VirtualBox. When I get to the screen to add a drive to FreeNAS, the list is empty. I have a hunch that this may be a limitation of VirtualBox. (see screenshot)

I've found some places on the web that teach you how to allow VirtualBox to access your physical disk (e.g. http://www.sysprobs.com/access-physical-disk-virtualbox-desktop-virtualization-software), but they always come with huge warnings that say you can corrupt your whole hd if you don't configure the files correctly (and other things). After reading through this tutorial, I kind-of just feel like I am just making things harder than they need to be.

In summary I guess I'm just asking:
1. Any thoughts on my problem listed above?
2. Have any of you successfully ran FreeNAS from a vm? (without using virtual disk storage)
3. Would running kvm help alleviate this problem?

Thanks to any thoughts!

[Ian]

Hi Kingliam and welcome to the forums

Maybe this thread can point you in the right direction.

I'm still in the process of updating my site for 12.04 so you may hit issues with it being out of date. Just post on these forums for help

Ian.

[Andy Horn]

I mucked around with FreeNAS a couple of years ago and I think you problem is that FreeNAS prefers UFS ( Unix File System ) and it may not want to play nicely with the Linux ext file system.

Have you tried mounting your file systems in Ubuntu as NFS shares?, I am not a big fan of NFS, don't ask why I just don't like it. Then may be FreeNAS will be able to access them.

Gotta to worth a shot.

Andy

P.S why do you want to run FreeNAS inside a Linux server?