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Comment by johnbrodie | Hacker News Reader

I _just_ built a FreeNAS box, and was relying on Corral to let me do virtualization. The box is overbuilt for home NAS use, and the plan was to use Corral to spin up docker and/or Debian VMs to give me a more familiar base in which to spin up other useful services.

Now that Corral isn't happening, would it be better to just virtualize the system and then have Debian VMs as needed? I wonder if I can migrate to a virtualized system without losing the data already in the ZFS pool :/

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`zfs export` is your friend. Its very easy to move a zpool to another machine so long as it has zfs support and you haven't enabled any incompatible feature flags. I recently moved my zpool from FreeBSD 11 to ubuntu 16.04. It was as simple as:

    sudo zfs export pool
    sudo shutdown # RIP freebsd machine
    # install ubuntu...
    sudo zfs import pool

That is:

  s/zfs/zpool/g

(I do it all the time, too.)

If you can properly passthrough your storage controller to a FreeNAS VM, then virtualization works and you won't even lose your current pool. I have ESXI installed on a PCIE SSD running a FreeNAS 9.10 VM with my SATA controller passed through to it. I can switch between that and natively booting a FreeNAS USB drive without any issues.

For what it's worth, the FreeNAS folks strongly discourage running FreeNAS virtualized.

I think you should be fine just creating a jail and manually installing Virtualbox in it...I'm looking into that myself. For a Debian VM you should be fine using iohyve even on the current release.

Strongly discouraged without understanding the nuances and having server grade hardware to do it. Basically, if you can passthrough your storage controller directly to a FreeNAS VM, then there shouldn't be issues.

You might want to read until the end of the announcement, it seems VMs are still there in 9.10.3.

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