- Joined
- Nov 25, 2013
- Messages
- 7,776
Hi all,
curiosity kills the cat - I finally bit the bullet and got myself an additional toy system. See the "Home VMware system" in my signature.
The system boots off a cheap Transcend 256 GB SATA SSD. I found that this brand in particular has awesome TBW for the SSD size and the price, that's why I've come to rely on them for boot media, specifically when I don't have redundancy as in this case or on my OPNsense appliance. Don't know what the downside is, but probably simply speed. Who cares for the boot drive?
I put two Samsung M.2 NVME SSDs in there that can be passed through. Seems to work great.
Then I installed a small (8G mem, 8 G virtual disk) VM with TrueNAS Core RC1. I could create the storage pool on the NVME drives. Woot!
General questions:
1. I get from the documentation that I should create a ZVOL to share via iSCSI. How large should I make that in terms of the pool size? This will of course be the only task of that pool. Should I plan for snapshots on the ZFS side? I think so. I would want to replicate that ZVOL to my main storage system for backup so a week of daily snapshots looks reasonable. I get the impression that one large blob of VMFS is not that manageable. Should I go for NFS instead so it's just files?
2. If I go for a ZVOL how large should the volblocksize be?
Problems so far:
I went ahead and just create a ZVOL and shared it via iSCSI to try out things. I can redo that any time should I need to change the size or the blocksize.
But while ESXi seems to see the target I don't see the drive itself and I cannot create a new datastore for that reason.
Any hints? I set up iSCSI sharing without any authentication - that runs at the office in a separate storage LAN with manual ctl.conf without problems. The config FreeNAS creates is slightly different, though.
I'll post a screenshot from ESXi 7.0 and the ctl.conf for starters. If you are inclined to help, of course ask for whatever additional info you need.
Thanks!
Patrick
curiosity kills the cat - I finally bit the bullet and got myself an additional toy system. See the "Home VMware system" in my signature.
The system boots off a cheap Transcend 256 GB SATA SSD. I found that this brand in particular has awesome TBW for the SSD size and the price, that's why I've come to rely on them for boot media, specifically when I don't have redundancy as in this case or on my OPNsense appliance. Don't know what the downside is, but probably simply speed. Who cares for the boot drive?
I put two Samsung M.2 NVME SSDs in there that can be passed through. Seems to work great.
Then I installed a small (8G mem, 8 G virtual disk) VM with TrueNAS Core RC1. I could create the storage pool on the NVME drives. Woot!
General questions:
1. I get from the documentation that I should create a ZVOL to share via iSCSI. How large should I make that in terms of the pool size? This will of course be the only task of that pool. Should I plan for snapshots on the ZFS side? I think so. I would want to replicate that ZVOL to my main storage system for backup so a week of daily snapshots looks reasonable. I get the impression that one large blob of VMFS is not that manageable. Should I go for NFS instead so it's just files?
2. If I go for a ZVOL how large should the volblocksize be?
Problems so far:
I went ahead and just create a ZVOL and shared it via iSCSI to try out things. I can redo that any time should I need to change the size or the blocksize.
But while ESXi seems to see the target I don't see the drive itself and I cannot create a new datastore for that reason.
Any hints? I set up iSCSI sharing without any authentication - that runs at the office in a separate storage LAN with manual ctl.conf without problems. The config FreeNAS creates is slightly different, though.
I'll post a screenshot from ESXi 7.0 and the ctl.conf for starters. If you are inclined to help, of course ask for whatever additional info you need.
Thanks!
Patrick
Code:
portal-group "default" { } portal-group "pg1" { tag "0x0001" discovery-filter "portal-name" discovery-auth-group "no-authentication" listen "0.0.0.0:3260" option "ha_shared" "on" } lun "vmware" { ctl-lun "0" path "/dev/zvol/ssd/vmware" blocksize "512" serial "000c29226238000" device-id "iSCSI Disk 000c29226238000 " option "vendor" "TrueNAS" option "product" "iSCSI Disk" option "revision" "0123" option "naa" "0x6589cfc0000003e726054d88a68318d9" option "insecure_tpc" "on" option "avail-threshold" "109951175884" option "pool-avail-threshold" "192414534860" option "rpm" "1" } target "iqn.2005-10.org.freenas.ctl:vmware" { alias "vmware" portal-group "pg1" "no-authentication" }
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