Migrate my Dell T440 to Truenas Scale - Hardware questions

[alplopy]

Hello people,

I own a Dell T440 server with the below hardware:
- PowerEdge T440 Server - Chassis with up to 8, 3.5" Hot Plug Hard Drives, Tower Configuration, PERC/HBA11
- PowerEdge T440 MLK Motherboard, V2
- Intel® Xeon® Silver 4214R 2.4G, 12C/24T
- 64GB DDR4-2400 - Performance Optimized - 3200MT/s RDIMMs
- BOSS-S1 controller card for M.2 Sticks
- PERC H750 Adapter, Full Height

For the moment, on this server I run Proxmox with few VMs/containers (Plex, some media VMs, Grafana, ...). In term of storage, it is pretty basic, using EXT4 and NFS/SMB shares + rclone auto backup.

I would be very interested to start running Truenas on my server. At first, I was tempted to virtualise it with Proxmox but then I realised that I do not use any fancy features from Proxmox that is not available in Truenas Scale. So why not get rid of Proxmox completely?! and run Truenas Scale instead with some VMs/containers. I could easily migrate some services out of this server if I need to split some stuff later on (eg. NUC).

Long story short, my main issues (except if I missed anything else) are those raid controllers. I'm aware that ZFS needs direct access to disks. For the moment, the first one (BOSS-S1) controls M.2 Sticks where Proxmox is running. The second (PERC H750) controls 2 SSD (raid 1) for VMs and 4 HDD (raid 5) for storage.

How can I get around this without spending $$$? Are there any configuration I could leverage or HBA card that would be compatible with my hardware?

I'd appreciate any insights on how to move forward. I'm a complete noob with ZFS - I just read about it.

Thank you in advance for your expertise!

 

[HoneyBadger]

Hey @alplopy

You're right in that the RAID controller (H750) is the main issue with the config here; but fortunately as you've got a tower-style system, you've got several options for installing a standard HBA, whether it's the Dell options like the HBA330/HBA355, or a standard LSI 9200/9300 series (or other OEM, reflashed)

The BOSS-S1 may or may not work well - I know some users have reported challenges with booting depending on firmware version of the card, but I'm not immediately opposed to it as a redundant boot device, even if it is a "Hardware RAID"

If you're interested in playing around with the TrueNAS UI and management, you can of course install it as a VM with virtual disks just to experiment; but don't store any critical data on it in this configuration. Have a look at the "Yes, you can virtualize TrueNAS" blog post - once obtained, you can pass the replacement HBA through using PCIe passthrough to the VM guest, and it will act much the same as if it's installed on the bare-metal hardware.

Welcome!

 

[alplopy]

Many thanks for your reply.

Would you reckon it makes more sense to have TrueNas installed on a VM (in my case) than completely replacing Proxmox with it?

I will of course play a bit with it before migrating everything but would be curious if you have any experience with this. I understand that Truenas Scale is not near Proxmox in term of VM/container features but I do not think I use any fancy features so wondering what would make more sense ?! I could easily install Plex, and all the tools I currently use in VM within Truenas as I do now with Proxmox.

Outside of this, would you know which HBA card would be best in term of compatibility (and price :D) to replace my PERC H750 knowing that I will still connect HDD as well as SSD onto it?

Thanks again :).

 

[firesyde424]

Hey @alplopy

You're right in that the RAID controller (H750) is the main issue with the config here; but fortunately as you've got a tower-style system, you've got several options for installing a standard HBA, whether it's the Dell options like the HBA330/HBA355, or a standard LSI 9200/9300 series (or other OEM, reflashed)

The BOSS-S1 may or may not work well - I know some users have reported challenges with booting depending on firmware version of the card, but I'm not immediately opposed to it as a redundant boot device, even if it is a "Hardware RAID"

If you're interested in playing around with the TrueNAS UI and management, you can of course install it as a VM with virtual disks just to experiment; but don't store any critical data on it in this configuration. Have a look at the "Yes, you can virtualize TrueNAS" blog post - once obtained, you can pass the replacement HBA through using PCIe passthrough to the VM guest, and it will act much the same as if it's installed on the bare-metal hardware.

Welcome!

We use the BOSS-S1 as a boot drive for a Dell PE R740xd, which would be the same generation as the T440. It has run TrueNAS Core for more than 4 years with 24 x 15.36TB Micron NVME drives in it. So far, we've not had an issue with the server or the BOSS-S1 card. Having said that, we have not booted TrueNAS Scale on it so I can't speak to that one. We do have a PowerEdge R7525 that uses the BOSS-S2 card. It ran TrueNAS Scale during testing, prior to deployment and did not have issues booting.

In general, both as boot drives for TrueNAS boxes and as boot drives for other OSes such as ESXi, we've not had any issues with the BOSS cards. They are simple, but effective.

 

[firesyde424]

Many thanks for your reply.

Would you reckon it makes more sense to have TrueNas installed on a VM (in my case) than completely replacing Proxmox with it?

I will of course play a bit with it before migrating everything but would be curious if you have any experience with this. I understand that Truenas Scale is not near Proxmox in term of VM/container features but I do not think I use any fancy features so wondering what would make more sense ?! I could easily install Plex, and all the tools I currently use in VM within Truenas as I do now with Proxmox.

Outside of this, would you know which HBA card would be best in term of compatibility (and price :D) to replace my PERC H750 knowing that I will still connect HDD as well as SSD onto it?

Thanks again :).

If you are just after 12GB SAS or SATA, get the PCIE version of the Dell HBA330. They are based on the LSI 9300 and are fully compatible with the T440, having been available as an option from the factory. They will work in TrueNAS Scale or Core out of the box and can be had for under $50 currently.