Play with the jails which are going to be going away for the most part in FreeNAS 11.2 but will be available via the command line, or so I'm told. While you are testing it, create and destroy your pools, play with encrypted pools too and realize that encrypted pools are not for everyone, we actually recommend against using them unless you have a real need for it. I hope your testing experience is a good one. Also the importance of your data is critical as you will need to know the redundancy level. I will place them back into service in another system hopefully in the coming weeks and see how long they last. Mt WD Red hard drives which I have recently removed from service temporarilly have just over 5 years on them with no errors.

I say 3 to 5 years because hard drives are lasting up to and beyond 5 years typically these days. If you intend to use FreeNAS as your storage solution then I would invite you to gather up all your throughts on what you want to use FreeNAS for and how much storage capacity you think you will need for 3 to 5 years. Of course you just wanted to evaluate FreeNAS in a VM on your OS so none of those comments actually help you. The Windoze version works fine and you could also run ESXi 6.5 for free and it works fine as well.

You shouldn't have to buy an enterprise version of VMWare to make this work but as I said, I have not used the Linux version of this product so maybe there is some odd behaviour here. Glad to hear you found a way around the problem.

Vmware player manjaro