Hi.
I am beyond frustrated at this point. I have the following hardware: Dell Poweredge R740xd and Dell MD3260 storage. The storage controller manages it’s storage pools, the drives just need to be mapped to the Server. Storage connected to the server via 2 SAS controllers and cards for redundancy. I want to use multipath for the 2 cables. I have used this same HW setup on a HPC storage server with Rocky EL9.
BUT: I am unable to find a relevant Truenas Core or Scale version which has multipath available and working. Newest versions does show the drives in shell lsblk, but naturally there are copies of each.
I cannot afford new hardware, and this is my chosen solution.
Please assist in guiding me towards a solution using Truenas, because my other option of using Rocky EL9 and then having to configure users, pools, samba etc… is too complicated…
Yep, iX removed the option to create new multi path pools, but kept the option to mount existing pools. As far as i can remember there was no option for multipath in any version of scale.
A solution that could work is as follows: Install Rocky EL9 on the server as host OS. Do the multipath mapping with it. Then install Truenas Scale as VM using KVM and pass mapped drives to Truenas. Thus giving me best of both…?
In my view if you are going to use TrueNAS then embrace the system don’t fight it. If you want multipath that much then TrueNAS is probably not the right route for you. All I’d suggest is that you read the above article and consider carefully why iX made the decision they did. I’m speaking as someone that used multipath on FreeNAS for years and loved it to using TrueNAS without it now and still love it. In my experience you are just as likely to have a JBOD issue that you can’t protect against using multipath than you are just a cable, card or controller fail.
Verify the SAS controller and see if it is a model that can be put in IT mode. TrueNAS need direct access to the disks with a controller in IT mode or a plain HBA, no RAID. If it can’t do that, plan on a new SAS controller.
This is a different question. Unless SCALE doesn’t work for you for whatever reason then I’d start with SCALE for obvious reasons. That’s coming from a long term CORE user.
