initial installation filesystem

[jcizzo]

Hi folks! absolute novice with truenas core here. I just performed my first installation of the OS last night and while i looked around the internet for answers, i never found anything that in my mind was a simple "yes/no" answer.

My installation of the os (on bare metal, across identical 512GB samsung SSD's, directly connected to the sata 3 ports on the motherboard), never prompted me to choose which filesystem i wanted to use, nor did it prompt me to choose which level of raid.

My question(s) are:
-Does truenas core default to zfs for the boot drives?
-Upon my placing the '*' next to the two drives i was installing the OS on, does it automatically create them as raid1 (mirrored with zfs)?

in pfsense, zfs is default but it gives filesystem options during the installation, plus it shows on the homepage/dashboard that the filesystem is zfs however i haven't found that on the truenas core dashboard.

thanks for your patience!

 

[Arwen]

There is no choice for OS or data file system(s). They are both ZFS. This is an appliance type software, so regardless of what FreeBSD may support, TrueNAS Core or SCALE only use ZFS, (for OS & data). You can import disks with other file systems, but they are not usable as NFS or Samba shares. However, after the import is done, the data will be on a ZFS data pool, which IS sharable.

Yes, selecting both SSDs during install would make a mirror of them for the OS. The OS drive only needs to be 16GB to 64GB, depending on if you use swap on it or not.


As a new user, their are lots of Resources available, (see tab at top of any forum page). Here are some useful ones for new users:

Introduction to ZFS

This is a short introduction to ZFS. It is really only intended to convey the bare minimum knowledge needed to start diving into ZFS and is in no way meant to cut Michael W. Lucas' and Allan Jude's book income. It is a bit of a spiritual...

www.truenas.com

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer

We realize that new users have a lot to learn when they come to FreeNAS. There's a certain amount of confusion added to discussions when users pick random/approximate terms to describe things. I've spent a lot of time quietly trying to...

www.truenas.com

I have to waste an entire drive just for booting?

With the advent of TrueNAS Scale, we seem to be getting a large number of people from the Linux community who are not quite grasping what TrueNAS is. TrueNAS is not a "Linux distro" and it is not designed to try to meet your arbitrarily spec'd...

www.truenas.com

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

ZFS Storage Pool Layout

This amazing document, created by iXsystems in February 2022 as a "White Paper", cleanly explains how to qualify pool performance touching briefly on how ZFS stores data and presents the advantages, performance and disadvantages of each pool...

www.truenas.com

 

[jcizzo]

There is no choice for OS or data file system(s). They are both ZFS. This is an appliance type software, so regardless of what FreeBSD may support, TrueNAS Core or SCALE only use ZFS, (for OS & data). You can import disks with other file systems, but they are not usable as NFS or Samba shares. However, after the import is done, the data will be on a ZFS data pool, which IS sharable.

Yes, selecting both SSDs during install would make a mirror of them for the OS. The OS drive only needs to be 16GB to 64GB, depending on if you use swap on it or not.


As a new user, their are lots of Resources available, (see tab at top of any forum page). Here are some useful ones for new users:

Introduction to ZFS

This is a short introduction to ZFS. It is really only intended to convey the bare minimum knowledge needed to start diving into ZFS and is in no way meant to cut Michael W. Lucas' and Allan Jude's book income. It is a bit of a spiritual...

www.truenas.com

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer

We realize that new users have a lot to learn when they come to FreeNAS. There's a certain amount of confusion added to discussions when users pick random/approximate terms to describe things. I've spent a lot of time quietly trying to...

www.truenas.com

I have to waste an entire drive just for booting?

With the advent of TrueNAS Scale, we seem to be getting a large number of people from the Linux community who are not quite grasping what TrueNAS is. TrueNAS is not a "Linux distro" and it is not designed to try to meet your arbitrarily spec'd...

www.truenas.com

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

ZFS Storage Pool Layout

This amazing document, created by iXsystems in February 2022 as a "White Paper", cleanly explains how to qualify pool performance touching briefly on how ZFS stores data and presents the advantages, performance and disadvantages of each pool...

www.truenas.com

cool, thanks! yeah, i only want zfs, just wasn't sure if i had to select it when doing the installation.

Re: scale and zfs: You're saying that if i were to download and create a thumbdrive installer for scale, it would install on zfs from the get-go? I thought there's a licensing issue that prevents the linux kernel from being able to be installed on a bootable zfs volume.. i've read about the work-arounds for linux on zfs but, for example, i still can't download bare-bones debian onto a thumbdrive and install it on a zfs partition by choice on a menu.. at least i was unaware of that..

Thanks again!

 

[danb35]

I thought there's a licensing issue that prevents the linux kernel from being able to be installed on a bootable zfs volume

Canonical (Ubuntu) doesn't think so. Neither does Proxmox--both of those are capable of installing to, and booting from, ZFS. Nor, apparently, does iXSystems. Yes, TrueNAS SCALE boots from ZFS, just like CORE.