Hyper-V Advice

[AlwaysHardToFindAName]

I'm new to TrueNAS and have spent many hours reading threads regarding iSCSI and Hyper-V. I've learned a lot but haven't found anything relating to my exact use case and am looking for some advice.

I have a Supermicro server with 16 x 8TB drives with 2 LSI HBAs and an Intel 10Gb NIC that I plan to use for VHD storage for a Hyper-V server. The server is used exclusively for backups and will host 2 VHDs that are each 20-30TB to start. It is backed up to 4 times a day with 2-20GB of changes per VHD per backup.

I had initially planned to use TrueNAS as an iSCSI target but after reading jgreco's many posts on the subject I'm not sure if that's a good idea. I understand the issues with eventual fragmentation using iSCSI and am wondering if I should expect to eventually have a lot of fragmentation with the VHDs as incremental backups inside the VHDs are merged and deleted over time. Alternatively would I be better off going with SMB 3? Most of the posts I find relating to Hyper-V and SMB 3 on TrueNAS are years old so I'm not sure what the current guidance is on that.

I had initially planned to set up a RAID60 for 96TB usable but after reading about vdevs and IOPS I'm wondering if anyone has a different recommendation. I'm also wondering how much I would benefit from a SLOG in this scenario since it would seem like a lot of the writes would be largish and sequential. I don't currently have any SSDs that would be appropriate for this but can get them if that is recommended.

I've got 48GB RAM in the server right now but can add another 48GB if recommended. Since I won't be doing many reads I wasn't sure if that was necessary.

Finally, I had originally planned to run TrueNAS on bare metal but then thought I would run it inside a Hyper-V VM on the Supermicro and pass through the HBAs instead. Would there be any problems with that? I realize I could run it in ESXi or Proxmox but all of our monitoring tools are Windows-based (the reason for putting it in Hyper-V in the first place) and I don't want to re-invent the wheel for one server.

Much appreciation in advance for any advice on this.

 

[sretalla]

Finally, I had originally planned to run TrueNAS on bare metal but then thought I would run it inside a Hyper-V VM on the Supermicro and pass through the HBAs instead. Would there be any problems with that? I realize I could run it in ESXi or Proxmox but all of our monitoring tools are Windows-based (the reason for putting it in Hyper-V in the first place) and I don't want to re-invent the wheel for one server.

Be aware that Hyper-V is the Betamax of hypervisors on which to run TrueNAS... ESXi is VHS. (Proxmox is somewhere int between, so I'll ignore it for this fun analogy)

If you want to be sure you can see all the latest movies (and you found a time machine to take you back to the eighties), you're much better off running ESXi.

If you're prepared to limit your viewing options to the small corner of the video store which offers Betamax copies, go ahead, but know that you'll need to be prepared for disappointment a lot of the time (and not a lot of help).

Seriously, though, I have seen a few reports in the forum of folks who run TrueNAS on Hyper-V and are happy with it, but those are really few compared to the cases where people can't get things like passthrough to work properly or are having other issues with networking and the like.

If you're going down that road, pe prepared to be a pioneer and be able to do your own troubleshooting.

If you want to stay on the well-trodden path, you have lots of "support" with others along for the ride with you:

"Absolutely must virtualize FreeNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

[---- 2018/02/27: This is still as relevant as ever. As PCIe-Passthru has matured, fewer problems are reported. I've updated some specific things known to be problematic ----] [---- 2014/12/24: Note, there is another post discussing how to deploy a small FreeNAS VM instance for basic file...

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Virtually FreeNAS ... an alternative for those seeking virtualization

[---- 2014/12/24: Note, there is another post describing how to create a full-sized FreeNAS VM directly managing a bunch of disks. THIS post is aimed at people wanting to use FreeNAS to provide a little basic file sharing off of virtual disks on shared VM storage. ----] There's been a lot of...

www.truenas.com

 

[AlwaysHardToFindAName]

Gotcha, thanks for the information.

Regarding how I divide the storage, do you have any recommendations? Would I be better off striping across 4 3-disk vdevs, or maybe something else? I planned to lose 4 disks worth of storage to parity but hoping to not lose too much more than that.

 

[sretalla]

Would I be better off striping across 4 3-disk vdevs, or maybe something else?

You seem to be planning to run TrueNAS as block storage, so the first thing to understand is that RAIDZ is not for you... you'll need IOPS, which means mirrors (and losing more storage than you want).

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