Drive layout suggestions for 10 12TB NVME drives

[cannoli]

Hello,

I've done some cursory searches and fond mixed suggestions for my scenario.

Server Configuration:

TrueNAS Core
Intel Xeon Gold 5317 - 12-cores
512GB RAM
10x Micron NVME 7450 MAX - 12.8TB drives
2x Supermicro Dual-Port Gen-4 Internal NVMe Host Bus Adapter - PCI-E x8
2x Supermicro Quad-Port Gen-4 Internal NVMe Host Bus Adapter - PCI-E x16
22 Hot Swap NVME bays
2 Hot Swap SSD bays


I am looking for a configuration to use for ESXi data stores, presenting either NFS or ISCSI. I'm not partial to either. I have two 10 Gbit NICs dedicated for storage connectivity to ESXi.

I'm looking for reasonable capacity but prefer performance for this datastore, which will be used for virtual machine VMDKs, so a level of resiliancy against drive failures is needed. what would be the ideal drive configuration for this use case?

With NVME drives, is there a ned for a SLOG or L2ARC?

Thank you for entertaining the noob questions.

 

[Ericloewe]

For small blocks, there's no question - mirrors are the solution. You can choose two or three-way, depending on your reliability requirements.

With NVME drives, is there a ned for a SLOG or L2ARC?

It depends. SLOG is still definitely valuable - you can use lower-latency SSDs and you defer a lot of steps that would have to take place in the write path.
L2ARC is a lot more circumstantial. Probably not super useful in most cases, but not useless in the abstract.

 

[CJRoss]

Will dual 10g get you the performance you want/need? I've been considering something like QSFP for this reason in order to make the transition from local to shared VM storage.