Success! TrueNAS ARM64 running on bare metal on MikroTik RDS2216

[sirbryan]

Ever since this green monster came out, I’ve wanted to run TrueNAS on it–mostly because MikroTik’s interface is lacking and they don’t support ZFS.

Now I have Proxmox and TrueNAS booting up natively on both the RDS2216 and CCR2116.

In this case, I’m net booting them (TFTP kernel + initramfs), with a custom init script that grabs a list of available root filesystems via DHCP. Another box serves up ZVOLs via NVMEoF.

For this machine, I loaded TrueNAS onto the ZVOL from a VM. I copied over my custom kernel modules, made a couple of tweaks, and here’s how it’s performing doing tests to/from my Mac Studio. (100G on RDS, 40G on Mac, SMB share, Jumbo frames, 128G consumer NVMe SSD’s for now.)

The RDS has two onboard M.2 SATA slots, so I’ll probably move the boot pool to one (or two) of those drives, leaving the 20 NVMe slots for ZFS pools.

[pmh]

That’s this insane Rose Data Server! Ermahgerd!

When they announced the hardware I went from OMG I love it to never going to run it in a minute or so. The hardware is just fantastic, but who wants RouterOS on a storage appliance?

[sirbryan]

@pmh

The hardware is just fantastic, but who wants RouterOS on a storage appliance?

For the most part, it’s been OK (the one on top in the pic is running RouterOS). It has rebooted once on me randomly, screwing up my ESXI hosts. But for NFS and iSCSI/NVMEoF shares, it’s been good. It’s a bit of a pain to set up (especially if you’re testing things a lot, like I did), but once it’s done, you don’t have to touch it.

But yeah, I wanted ZFS replication between hosts and ZVOLs and snapshots and and and….