TrueNas Scale Instance Migration Advice

TrueNAS General
1

Hey guys,

I have purchased a new machine that I would like to migrate my TrueNas Scale 25.10.3 instance to, preferably with the least amount of headache possible.

My build so far as the drives consist of:

OS Boot Pool - Consists Of 1x Drive
Apps Pool - Consists Of 2x Drive (Mirror)
VM Machine Pool - Consists Of 2x Drive (Mirror)
Data Pool - Consists Of 4x Drives (Mirror)

In addition to this I have a Cache Drive & Log Drive.

Upon investigation, I have two choices.

  1. Create a config backup of TrueNas (including secrete seed), move all my drives over, install a fresh copy of TrueNas Scale, restore my TrueNas config file and re-import my pools.

As I have never moved a TrueNas instance, if I carry out the above, will importing my TrueNas backup config as well as importing my pools keep all my apps and their associated configs all intact? This assumes that my applications have there configs/data stored in a host location, not an Ixsystems created location. If no, is there a best method for this?

Just looking to avoid re-installing all the apps and reconfiguring.

Lastly, would re-importing my cache and log drive be the same process as re-importing my pools?

  1. Upon searching I noticed that people have gotten away with simply moving all the drives over and booting up into the same OS drive as used before.

Have many people had success with this? For some context, my current TrueNas server uses an Intel Xeon Platform (E5-2696 v4) and my new server also uses an Intel Xeon Platform, just newer Xeon Platinum CPU’s (8276).

While the machines use different Intel chipsets (C612 vs C621E), I am wondering if it is worth a shot just swapping the drives over and see how I fair. I will already have made a backup of the TrueNas config and for sanity sake I will create an image of the OS drive.

Are there any dangers from giving this a shot and falling back to option 1 if it doesn’t work out?

Happy to hear any other thoughts and advice, as I say, this will be my first attempt at moving TrueNas from one machine to another.

Thanks in advance.

2

You shouldn’t have any issues. ZFS doesn’t use the drive letters, but the drive GUIDs to determine pool membership. So long as you carry over all the pool drives, and other pool member VDEVs (cache, log, etc.), and apply your saved config to a clean install of the same version, everything will carry over and you’ll be back up & running after the post config upload reboot.

3

Thanks for your comment.

Does this include Apps? I assume that any Apps that use Ixsystem for creating config/storage space for apps would not carry over?

4

If the pool that you set as Apps in the GUI is present in the machine once the old config is uploaded your Apps will start running again

5

Thanks for confirming, that should save me some pain.

6

A little update, I was fortunate and I was able to move over all my drives into the new server build and fired it up and it booted into TrueNas and everything was normal, the only thing I had to re-configure was the network as I had swapped out my network card for something newer, but other than that it was very smooth.