UnexpectedDevelopment
Cadet
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2023
- Messages
- 9
I honestly have read up on this subject until I'm blue in the face, but it seems that there are so many ways to do this, each write up that I find is hyper-specific to a particular piece of hardware. For this reason, I never get "the big picture."
I've been doing NAS/SAN work for three decades now, and so far I've always gone one of two routes. Homegrown with a single PC/controller and Linux+Samba for sharing, or I'd go for an enterprise turn-key solution with dual controllers for HA. I am a veteran Linux admin, and I am very familiar with ZFS. This post is not about either.
I recently came into an all-SSD NAS with something like 32 SAS drive slots. It is a Storbyte SBS 4:48. The hardware is non-proprietary and is simply fantastic, and the manufacturer says they fully support ditching their (horrible) proprietary software and going with anything else. They mention RHEL as an example. My question is this.
This chassis has essentially two totally independent, removable, standard PC motherboards each with it's own NICs and a boot drive. Each motherboard connects to a single (shared) drive backplane via its own PCIe SAS interface card.
Suppose I load TrueNAS Scale on each of these motherboards. This would result in two totally independent instances of TrueNAS that don't know about each other, and each of them would see the same 32 SSD's. I do understand multi-channel SAS at the drive level, but I am totally ignorant about multi-channel backplanes.
How in the world would I make this sane, and assuming I even could, how would it actually work? Does one of the motherboards with its independent copy of TrueNAS just sit passive until the primary motherboard and its instance of TrueNAS instance dies?
Any explanation would be greatly appreciated.
I've been doing NAS/SAN work for three decades now, and so far I've always gone one of two routes. Homegrown with a single PC/controller and Linux+Samba for sharing, or I'd go for an enterprise turn-key solution with dual controllers for HA. I am a veteran Linux admin, and I am very familiar with ZFS. This post is not about either.
I recently came into an all-SSD NAS with something like 32 SAS drive slots. It is a Storbyte SBS 4:48. The hardware is non-proprietary and is simply fantastic, and the manufacturer says they fully support ditching their (horrible) proprietary software and going with anything else. They mention RHEL as an example. My question is this.
This chassis has essentially two totally independent, removable, standard PC motherboards each with it's own NICs and a boot drive. Each motherboard connects to a single (shared) drive backplane via its own PCIe SAS interface card.
Suppose I load TrueNAS Scale on each of these motherboards. This would result in two totally independent instances of TrueNAS that don't know about each other, and each of them would see the same 32 SSD's. I do understand multi-channel SAS at the drive level, but I am totally ignorant about multi-channel backplanes.
How in the world would I make this sane, and assuming I even could, how would it actually work? Does one of the motherboards with its independent copy of TrueNAS just sit passive until the primary motherboard and its instance of TrueNAS instance dies?
Any explanation would be greatly appreciated.
