FreeNAS hangs on startup

[alizee]

I have a FreeNAS system running on an ESXi box that works until I set up a ZFS volume. Once I do, and I restart the VM, it hangs on "Mounting Local File systems:". Is there anything I can do to troubleshoot it? It starts up fine again once I disconnect all the attached drives.

I have a 6-drive RAID-Z2 setup (with or without 2 hot spares), and a Rocket RAID 2720 passed through to the VM. The PSU is definitely able to handle 8 drives spinning up.

Thanks!

 

[theevilsharpie]

Does FreeNAS work properly if you give the VM disk drives as VMDK's, rather than passing through your RAID controller?

 

[alizee]

Does FreeNAS work properly if you give the VM disk drives as VMDK's, rather than passing through your RAID controller?

I haven't tried that, I'll give it a go.

I finally let it sit for an extended period of time and it started up properly with the ZFS volume attached. I'm not sure how long it took to start up, I checked at the 20 minute mark, and then again when I went to bed about two hours later and it was up. Is longer than 20 minutes expected behavior for a large ZFS volume?