Convince me why this should use Truenas (for this application)!

[mixhali]

HI al, intriquing title i know! hopefully enticed you to open this question.

Background. - My client has a single HyperV server using direct storage on DL380 Gen 9 Hardware. Currently 7TB in a Raid 5 Config. They have run out of storage and have asked me to help them move to new storage. they have already purchased 4 14TB Drives. There original idea was to simply back up the existing hyper v guests, blow away the disks and start a fresh on locally installed 14TB. However they didn't realize how much downtime this was going to cause them during the restore. (Another Issue)

They have a second DL380 G8 laying around doing nothing with 64GB ram Dual Xeon(16Cores Total) and 10GIG network. So i thought i would give Truenas a try and install the 14TB disks in that. Both have 10GB links, 2 free so it should work just fine.

Then i discover this 50% rule or more specific degraded performance somewhere after 50% volume utilsation. with 3 14TB disks we are already losing 33% roughly when we create the pool. Then am i right in that to should performance we should never use more than 50% of our already 30% reduced total disk space? Means net gain for purchasing 42TB of storage is 5TB over the existing 7TB they had. Is there any tricks to reduce the impacts of this? or is it just accepted.

How serious is the degradation compared to me installing the disk natively using the Built in raid controller. There current capacity of 7tb as less than 200Gb available and the performance is acceptable. (they are not heavy hitting users) would I expect to see the same on truenas?

I'm thinking just to manage the move using the spare server using local storage now with this limitation

Another question i would like to ask is regarding backup. We use Veeam curently to back up the hyperV guests. With truenas should i use the same approach or back up direct from the trunas server? Will this still enable them to do file level restores or email recovery? Is Veeam suitable for Truenas backup?

Regards for your help

 

[sretalla]

With 14 TB disks, you should never be considering RAIDZ1, so you're losing 50% to redundancy in that case (with 4 drives to make sense as a minimum).

Since you're talking about block storage, you're not going to be happy with performance if you use any kind of RAIDZ (you get the IOPS of a single drive).

The path to success for block storage

It seems like I haven't written a sticky for awhile, but just in the last week I've had to cover this topic several times. ZFS does two different things very well. One is storage of large sequentially-written files, such as archives, logs, or data files, where the file does not have the middle...

www.truenas.com

From the link above, you can also understand the 50% maximum requirement for block storage.

Generally speaking, for block storage you want a lot more disks (so consider smaller ones) in a mirrored pair configuration

We use Veeam curently to back up the hyperV guests. With truenas should i use the same approach or back up direct from the trunas server? Will this still enable them to do file level restores or email recovery? Is Veeam suitable for Truenas backup?

That raises a lot of questions and issues... you could just continue to backup as you have been doing.

Snapshots are an option separately to that with TrueNAS, but you would need to develop a procedure to run a recovery VMs against the snapshot(s) (potentially in a separated/disconnected, but self sufficient from Active directory perspective, environment) to get partial recovery from those.

installing the disk natively using the Built in raid controller

Depending on how much supporting and education you want to do for the client, this may be the best option to keep things super-simple and "as they are".

I suspect that you would need to educate yourself quite a bit as well if you go down the road of ZFS, separate storage/NAS/SAN and iSCSI with snapshots which you seem to have only a basic understanding about.

 

[NugentS]

Actually - there may be a better suggestion.
The VM's. What are they?
I suspect that one of them is probably taking a lot of space with file shares which IMHO does not belong on a virtual machine.

If I am right - try moving the fileshares onto the/a NAS directly which should then allow the VM's to shrink considerably.

VM's need IOPS. RAID Zx does not supply good IOPS
Mirrored vdevs for the win, preferably using SSD's

 

[ChrisRJ]

My client [..]

I am admittedly in a bit of a grumpy mood today. But quite frankly, I find it appalling that the community should solve a problem and you collect money for pretending to have done it yourself. If I completely misread this, I apologize. But there was a number of somewhat similar post recently.