Help me spec a server for ISCSI

TrueNAS General
1

Hi everyone,

I’m new to TrueNas and after a lot of research I believe its the best OS for my requirements.

I need a high storage server therefore thinking of mechanical drives but at the same time I also need high performance and appreciate the two don’t mix very well. However, I’m looking at adding 2 X 8TB NVME drives for caching and also I can throw in as much ram as needed i.e. 640GB ram won’t be an issue, providing it will help performance.

Most of my VMs run on ESXI and are currently around 1-2 TB in size, my thinking is that most of the VM should in theory be cached by the NVME drives, right? as the NVME cache is higher than the entire VM itself.

What kind of speed/performance should I expect from this type of setup, trying to workout of its worth doing.

In terms of server hardware, I’m considering a HP DL380 Gen10 with either 20 or 40 cores depending if I really need that many and 40GB QSFP uplink.

Any help or advise would be much appreciated.

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“Cash” on ZFS/Truenas is your ARC = RAM, so maximazing that is the first thing you should think about.

With block storage/iSCSI it is recommended to use lots of vdevs in pairs of mirrors of SSDs.
If all your VM data fits on the 2 NVMEs, then I would run them directly from them.

If this is a production enviroment, I would even think of a 3-way mirror, just to be safe.

Here is some good reading from the old forum:

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