Just cannot seem to get away from Inception...

[Scharbag]

We are decommissioning a bunch of HPE DL380 servers - so a grabbed a couple :)

Trying to figure out a way to stop virtualizing TrueNAS. This is not due to any issues with TrueNAS being virtualized, I have been doing that for years... It is because I want a cluster :| But I just cannot justify the power costs to run so much CPU in my house.

Alas, I am leaning towards shifting from my SuperMicro to the DL380. I am likely going to leverage the DL380's RAID card and run my VMs on DAS and just keep my data on TrueNAS. We will see. Anyone else running similar to this? The iSCSI performance has been great but DAS SSDs are going to be quicker and easier to deal with. I use Veeam to backup now, so I am no longer really leveraging ZFS snapshotting.

Anyway, has anyone else had the same struggles trying to migrate back to separate servers for ESXi and TrueNAS?

Cheers,

 

[Davvo]

I am likely going to leverage the DL380's RAID card

RAID card and ZFS? Shudder

 

[Scharbag]

RAID card and ZFS? Shudder

lol. No, just for a boot volume for ESXi. ZFS stuff will all run through my LSI HBAs. :)

 

[Scharbag]

My co-worker had a good thought - swap in a low power Xeon into one server and run TrueNAS on that. Then it might be possible to run both at a nominal power increase over my older SuperMicro system which seems to be a little power hungry.

We shall see.

I guess this means I need to figure out NIC teaming on TrueNAS as well as iSCSI over actual ethernet...

And I wonder if TrueNAS supports a Intel 82599 10GigE card...

So many questions :)

 

[Scharbag]

Well, that was a bit more work than I had hoped... But I made it to end goal of no longer virtualizing TrueNAS. Just need a couple parts and this should be done. iSCSI over 2 1GigE interfaces is not overly awesome. Need a 10GigE switch. All of the NICs are fully supported in TrueNAS it seems (interfaces are present).

Now - did I need to do this? Hard no - the virtualized solution was working fine. I did this more out of an exercise to see if I could leverage the old servers I got from work.

If my power bill was not going to be so high, I would add another DL380 and configure a cluster. But, that is going too far :)

I still 100% support proper virtualization of TrueNAS on good hardware. We will see, I may go back to that if the 10GigE switch is a POS.

Cheers,

 

[Scharbag]

Well, I went full idiot.

2 ESXi hosts - full DRS cluster with automatic power management. And a cheap 10GigE switch.

Power is cheap right (and that is with 1 system off...)? Now, if I bring home the 3PAR SAN when we retire it, just shoot me. :)

This thread is useless and should be deleted as I have offered almost zero to this community...

Keep those platters spinning!!