Assistance in migrating from Unraid to TrueNAS

TrueNAS General
7

@BlueBell_XA Nicholoas

Apologies for the lengthy response and for it being a bit of a brain dump.

  1. I agree with others - run TrueNAS on bare metal and use TN virtualisation if you want to run VMs.

  2. You can run Docker native on TrueNAS EE. No need to spin up a VM for this.

  3. I would personally use the following drives in your new setup: 2 new 4TB drives, 2 4TB SAS drives, 2x 500GB SSDs PLUS 2 new M.2 128GB NVME drives (MB supports Optane, so think about these if you can). I would use these as follows:

    • 4x 4TB drives as a RAIDZ1 (or RAIDZ2) HDD pool
    • 2x 500GB SSDs - as a mirrored Apps/VMs SSD pool
    • 1x NVME - boot drive
    • 1x NVME - SLOG for SSD pool (because VMs do synchronous writes)

    I would probably connect all the SATA drives directly to the MB (which has SATA ports), and put only the SAS drives on the HBA. You will need to check that using the M.2 slots doesn’t shut down SATA 4/5.

    If you want to keep using the other misc. sized drives for misc data you can, but misc. sized drives are not really suitable for redundant pools in TrueNAS, but are great if you ever need some disk for temporary, less important data, (experimental VMs, downloaded files which you can download again if need be etc.)

  4. 32GB memory to start with should be fine - keep an eye on your App/VM memory usage and your ARC hit rate to check when you need to add more memory.

  5. As you have already identified, you will need to think carefully about how you will migrate your data.

    You are probably running your HBA in RAID mode - you will need to reflash it to IT mode for TrueNAS / ZFS, and you will likely lose access to any existing data connected to the HBA when you do this.

    Ideally you will copy your data off the machine - either to another computer or two copies to separate unencrypted drives - ideally with ZFS filesystem, but another file system like ext3 will do if need be (but for non-ZFS I think you may have to mount it manually to migrate the data back).

    I would imagine that if you set your HBA to see one of the new SAS drives as JBOD, and put a temporary ZFS file system on it, then there is a good chance that you will retain access after you switch the HBA to IT mode. But you cannot be sure of this, so put another copy of your data onto the smaller SATA drives just in case.

    Before installing TrueNAS, physically remove the drives holding your data so there is no chance of it being overwritten.

I hope that this helps.

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