New production TrueNAS hardware build - Supermicro 24 bay - NVME - VMware iscsi

[curruscanis]

Hello, and thank you for taking the time to read my post and provide any information. I have a VMware cluster that currently is using a FreeNAS built on a 45Drives systems that is about 4 years old and has been great for our speed and storage needs. We are looking to upgrade our storage systems to a new device built on TrueNAS. My initial thoughts are to build something similar to these hardware specifications:

Chassis: Supermicro Hyper SuperServer 220H-TN24R - 2U - 24x NVMe/SATA/SAS - 2x M.2 - 1600W (1+1) Redundant
CPU's: 2 x Intel® Xeon® Silver 4310 Processor 12-Core 2.1GHz 18MB Cache (120W)
Memory 512GB: 8 x 64GB PC4-25600 3200MHz DDR4 ECC RDIMM
Boot Drives: 2 x 480GB Micron 7450 PRO Series M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive (80mm)
Storage Drives for iSCSI: 24 x 3.84TB Micron 7450 PRO Series U.3 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive (15mm)
iSCSI NICS: 2 x Broadcom NetXtreme 10-Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter P210P - PCIe 3.0 x8 - 2x SFP+
Management NICS: Supermicro AIOM OCP 3.0 - 4x 1GbE RJ45 - Intel i350-AM4 - PCI-E 2.1 x4 - AOC-AG-i4M

This hardware list is spec'd using the Thinkmate.com configurator as its easy... I may go with larger total storage drives uping them from 3.8TB to the 7.6TB drives depending on storage needs but the performance for the NVMe drives should be the same.

My questions are as follows:
1. Is this hardware capable of running a reliable TrueNAS system as configured? Specifically, are the CPU's good enough or should they be more powerful?
2. Specifically for VMware iSCSI storage we have run mirrored vdev's, which was the recommendation back with spinning drives, our current production FreeNAS system uses 20 x 6tb 7200RPM seagate drives with a 1.9TB SSD drives for SLOG and ARC, in a new environment with all NVMe drives are mirrored vdevs still the best route given that the allocated final storage is only 25% of the total? Or should I use a different ZFS raid / vdev arrangement?
3. With NVMe drives for our storage pool, should I use a SLOG drive given the raw speed of the drives even with the double write?
4. With 512GB of RAM and the high speed storage drives is an ARC drive needed?

Thank you very much for your asisstance, although we have been very successful in our first FreeNAS and it has run flawlessly for over 4 years, I am still no expert in ZFS or TrueNAS and how to properly spec the hardware and setup.

 

[NugentS]

I thought I responded to this.
You are at the bleeding edge of speed here - on the NVMe drives. Why are you "cheaping out" on the CPU's? I realise you aren't using SMB - but iSCSI uses CPU and you are using "slow" 2.1GHz CPU's.
Other than that - nice

 

[curruscanis]

Thank you for your input NugentS, I understand that this is all new hardware and our goals are indeed speed but reliability is key first. As for the CPU's my intention is to not "cheap out" but use the most appropriate one with justification. My post here was to help my understanding of our TrueNAS utilizes the hardware I proposed and change it if needed. If you were to recommend a different CPU what would that be, and what would the potential benefit be vs the one posted?

 

[NugentS]

Honestly, at this level of hardware I don't know - I just wouldn't be using a CPU with such a "slow" baseclock. iSCSI does use CPU so the more CPU here the better (within reason)
I would be using mirrors - just for the IOPS
And I would be using a SLOG - maybe an RMS300-16G (pair) - but that will need two extra PCIe slots I think and wether you can fit them in a 2U server I don't know.
I would not be using L2ARC - at least not initially and would keep an eye on the ARC useage / hit rate.

I think however I would first go to IX Systems and ask about their hardware and price it up as well. You are talking close to bleeding edge here with hardware that the community mostly doesn't have

 

[MrGuvernment]

Agree, as often noted around here, unless you plan to do lots of dedupe and stuff, faster Mhz per core would often do better to keep up with that storage...

With all that storage, are you limited to 10Gb due to your switches?