Finally gave up on QNAP

[ChrisD.]

After many years of using QNAP, I was seeing some 'odd' performance behaviour; that combined with all of the recent bad press had me looking at other solutions. I was already in need of a second NAS so I decided to build an AMD based system and install TrueNAS Core onto it. It performed so well that I decided to install TrueNAS Core onto my QNAP TVS-671A as well.

My main use case is NFS based storage for a *ahem* Plex Server I run, plus iSCSI based storage for my vSphere homelab as well as general home based SMB and TimeMachine shares. Essentially, just storage, so I had no interest in Scale and I won't be running any plugins as that's all catered for elsewhere at home.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Welcome! You'll definitely find a large number of users hosting various Linux ISOs and other media purely of their own creation on Plex here.

iSCSI based storage for my vSphere homelab

Depending on how serious you want to get about this, you can certainly go down a very deep rabbit hole of performance tuning and data security here. VM disks are one of the heavier workloads that you can throw at storage.

 

[ChrisD.]

Welcome!

Thank you!

Depending on how serious you want to get about this, you can certainly go down a very deep rabbit hole of performance tuning and data security here. VM disks are one of the heavier workloads that you can throw at storage.

One thing I've discovered so far is

Code:

no ping reply (NOP-Out) after 5 seconds; dropping connection

which was causing hosts to lock up when using jumbo frames (correctly configured along the whole path) and high throughput. I've dropped it to 1500 bytes now and for now it seems to have solved it, although it's now dropped storage vMotion throughout to ~5.6 Gbps from the ~9+ Gbps I was getting with jumbo frames enabled.

I've got some more reading to do tomorrow if I get time as I'd like to restore 9k MTU but for now I'll favour stability over performance!

 

[ChrisD.]

Code:

Apr 18 21:33:36 lando WARNING: 172.16.5.12 (iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:3440-2.chris.local:319309756:64): no ping reply (NOP-Out) after 5 seconds; dropping connection

I spoke too soon.

 

[Samuel Tai]

How is your pool constructed? For VMs, you typically want to use mirrors for IO, instead of RAID for capacity.

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

 

[ChrisD.]

How is your pool constructed? For VMs, you typically want to use mirrors for IO, instead of RAID for capacity.

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

I have one pool for data and backups on each NAS, I then have 2 NVMe drives in each NAS presented as block devices how they are. I run nightly backups so I'm not overly bothered if one of the NVMe drives fails.

 

[ChrisD.]

Actually thinking about it, I couldn't work out how to mirror the two drives and present them as a single mirrored block device without going down the pool route, which is probably more accurate for how I ended up with the setup I have.