First of all, I am very new to TrueNAS. So, please excuse me beforehand for my possibly stupid questions…
I have purchased an HP Microserver Gen8 to install only the Plex Media Server to host all my movies.
I have managed to install TrueNAS on SSD1, created Pools for Apps on SSD2 and 4 hard drives for Media, and lastly installed Plex (as a Jail - on SSD2).
So at the moment, I can use the system from my Windows 11, transfer files to Media Pool (SMB Service) and everything works just fine.
I recently purchased two Mellanox ConnectX 2 NIC Cards, and could install them successfully on both HP MicroServer Gen 8 and my Windows 11 PCs.
As you can see it’s Link State is Up. And in Windows it is running but I did not set any manual IP or Subnet because I am not sure what they should be, to be able to connect to TrueNAS.
Now, I would like to use these NICs for file transferring from my PC, and I am stuck. How can I tell TrueNAS to use this card to be used for Storage Pool, and my PC to connect to SMB service via this new NIC card? I thought maybe I should create a bridge at both sides (TrueNAS and Windows 11), but I could not get any results, probably because I do not know exactly what I am doing, and I could not find any clear information for this specific need.
Any direction would be much appreciated as I am lost…
You could create a bridge on TrueNAS with the onboard 1G interface and the new 10G one as members while keeping the IP address you had previously assigned. It just needs to move over to the bridge interface.
With the 1G connected to your router or switch like before and the NAS working plug the 10G of your PC into the 10G of your NAS and let it get its configuration via DHCP. Don’t connect the 1G of your PC.
Now everything between PC and NAS will be 10G while the rest of your infrastructure including Internet uplink will be 1G.
If you want more systems to be able to access the NAS at higher speed you need a 10G switch.
You won’t. You’d have the IP on bridge1, and no IP at all on bge0. But I don’t see any way that a MicroServer Gen8 will be able to make any use of a 10 GbE NIC, nor any reason you’d want greater than 1 Gbit/sec for Plex.
have you considered a switch to really simplify your network design here? you can bridge / use IP addresses / host files etc to directly connect, but with a low cost switch you can drop your workstation and TNAS server to one physical NIC, always use the DNS name, always use the fastest path etc. Once I did this I found things just a bit simpler to manage. You can get one from amazon that has two sfp+ and 4 2.5G ports. that you can add to your existing rtr / switch. add a DAC cable to what you are using now and you are done.
I understand both cards will get their IPs from this switch, but my main problem is how to tell TrueNAS to use this network only for SMB and Media Pool. How will I do that?
You can either bind it to that IP in SMB service settings, or, if you’re mounting it with the 10GbE interface’s IP Address, it should use it anyway.
By default pretty much everything in TrueNAS listens on 0.0.0.0, so everything should be accessible via either interface.
When you connect to TrueNAS via the 10.100.10.1 as suggested, it will use the matching interface. This only works when the 1G and the 10G interface are in different networks! You must not configure two IP addresses from the same network on two different interfaces of a single host.
That’s why I suggested the bridged setup but using a separate statically configured network will work, too. Then just run a cable from 10G on your PC to 10G on your NAS bypassing the 1G switch.
Sure, but what does that have to do with Plex? Nothing, obviously. Moreover, you’re not going to see any significant performance improvement from a 10 GbE NIC, because your drives are going to continue to be a major limit on throughput, as is much of the rest of your hardware. Not only that, the ConnectX-2 is an ancient piece of hardware that’s poorly-supported at best. Lots of strikes here.
But really, what you’re trying to do is overly-complicated for no real reason. The best solution has already been mentioned up-topic, and that’s to buy a switch. Then connect the 10G NIC on your NAS to it, connect the 10G NIC on your Windows box to it, and connect it to the rest of your network. Ignore the GbE NICs on your NAS and your Windows box. There’s simply no need for a multi-network configuration here.
You do that by remembering everytime you want to do that type of activity to use the new ip address when you establish the connection. If you don’t want to have to bother with that you simplify to using the switch as I suggested.
I’ll 2nd what was mentioned about over all ease - get a 10Gb switch, or a switch with a couple 10Gb ports (I always refer back to use Brocade ICX switches like:
Now what should I do to use this specific network to reach the media pool in the TrueNas from my computer? Because at the moment I can not reach 10.100.10.1 from my computer.
Bear in mind that the SATA is very slow on the Gen8, too.
IIRC two of the ports are 3Gb/s (3 and 4) and two are 6Gb/s (1 and 2).
Most people put a SAS HBA in the PCIe slot and instead bond the two NICs to get 2GbE. You’ll get better overall performance that way, and you can access the disks directly with the HBA in IT mode.
