Coming over from years of dealing with small NAS boxes (synology) for clients…
I’ve got a decent Dell7xxx rack with 14 SSD Drives
• 8pc of 6TB
• 3pc of 8TB
• 2 pc of 256GB SSD (for proxmox and for TrueNAS.
I’ve got Proxmox running, and installed TrueNAS on one of the SSDs.
I"m a bit lost as to best config for the 6TB and 8TB drives - though I’m supposing it best to create a pair of ZFS raidz2 volumes (one for the 6tb and one for the 8tb?).
this will be a data repository for my office - we currently are running an older Synology with ~ 50TB of data on it. I’d like to replace it.
Questions:
is this best recommendation (create ZFS RAID in Proxmox, then ‘pass’ it over to TrueNAS?
I saw something about crash/failure issues, when doing this… what am I missing?
the idea of doing a passthru seems overly complex… Is it a good idea?
tx
You need to make sure you set up Proxmox and TrueNAS correctly as there are a lot of problems if the HBA cards and boot drives aren’t protected from Proxmox accessing them.
You also need to verify the HBA is in IT mode or is just a plain HBA model.
No. ZFS and external / hardware RAID just don’t work reliably.
TrueNAS only uses ZFS for storage. ZFS really, really wants direct access to the disks which hardware RAID does not do, (even if you present each disk as a LUN / JBOD).
ZFS will automatically correct, (aka spare out), failing sectors and let you know in the stats. But, that ONLY happens if ZFS has direct access to the disks.
Passing through a HBA, (NOT hardware RAID controller), is the only reliable and data safe method to use when virtualizing TrueNAS.
Further, blacklisting the HBA, (or SATA controller), in ProxMox seems to be also needed. This is to prevent ProxMox from mounting up the ZFS pool, which TrueNAS will be doing. ZFS is NOT a clustered file system. So if 2 “hosts” access the same ZFS pool at the same time, that is guaranteed to damage your ZFS pool. Perhaps fatally.
