Question on expanding virtualized boot pool

TrueNAS General
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Hello Everyone,

I have setup my SCALE as PVE VM in proxmox.
I followed the known virtualization guide as much as possible, and have an HBA passing through the DataPool Disks, but the boot pool is virtual disks from the hypervisors disk pool.

I’m running boot pool on 2 mirrored drives and am running out of space there.
What would be the best way to expand it?
My best guess is creating 2 new, bigger virtual disks and replace them within Scale one-by-one?
Is that the right way to do it?
Resizing the disks doesn’t feel right.

Thanks
Chris

2

How can your boot pool be running out of space?

Have you gone into System Settings / Boot and removed all the out of date versions of TrueNAS that result from upgrades to new versions?

Or are you somehow storing your own stuff on the boot pool?

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3

Thanks a bunch!
I kept last 3 versions and am still well below 50% by deleting older ones.

4

No problem.

5

Why would you even mirror virtualized disks? This is totally unnecessary overhead. VM’s can be easily snapshot and restored in Proxmox anyway. If anything, the PVE drives are really the ones that should be mirrored.

No, you can expand the virtual disk by simply editing the pve conf file to make it larger. If it is a ZVOL, you would also have to increase the volume size. Then you must also boot the VM and increase it from within the VM itself. The exact instruction depends on the file system used for the boot pool.

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6

Thanks, that makes absolutely sense.
I didn’t think that through properly.
Is there an easy way to “downgrade” the mirror pool to a single disk vdev?
Just removing one disc and run a degraded mirror seems not great either.

7

Hmm, that’s a good question. I’m not sure if there is a way to alter the disks easily, but there is an easy alternative way to do it though; and it is made possible and relatively painless due to the “appliance” nature of TrueNAS architecture and also the reason why I tell people that mirroring TrueNAS boot drive is kind of overkill for the vast majority of home users.

  1. Backup your TrueNAS config file.
  2. Make a new VM with the correct disk configuration you want.
  3. Reinstall TrueNAS SCALE on that VM.
  4. Restore the config file.
  5. Play around with the VM and make sure that everything is working properly just like it was before.
  6. Once you’re sure of step 5, delete the old TrueNAS SCALE VM and its respective virtual disks.
  7. Profit.

I suspect the whole process should take you no more than 15 minutes.

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