IronDuke
Dabbler
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2023
- Messages
- 18
Hi, new user here, based in East Tennessee. I've been very impressed with TrueNAS so far. A few bumps in the road, but that's to be expected.
For a year or two now, I've had a VMWare ESXi (free version) installation on the rig that is now my SCALE box. I was running 3D printer control software and using it as an NVR for security cameras at home. The hardware was an HP DL360 G9 that I bought two of on eBay for ridiculously cheap (like $275 ea). I was originally going to sell the other one to recoup some of the money, but then thought it was a good source of spares, at the very least, so kept it. Getting more into photography and videos, I realized I needed to up my game on storage, so I thought I'd set up the spare one as a NAS box. Enter FreeNAS, which I then realized was now TrueNAS CORE.
Well... after installing CORE, it was like night and day compared with ESXi for my use case. I was running 7u3, which looks like something from the 90s to be honest. CORE's GUI is just beautiful, responsive and easy to use. I didn't actually realize that it had virtualization capability, and I ran up a couple of Ubuntu Server test VMs, and it was quite easy, although the Bhyve framework is a bit Noddy in comparison to ESXi. But it's a NAS box, not really a virtualization platform.
After the epiphany, I thought "why not" - I backed up my VMs on the ESXi platform, blew it away and installed SCALE on it. Wow! Even better feature set, with three different ways to run apps - Kubernetes, Docker and full OS virtualization, as well as the ZFS NAS features of CORE. Holy cow, this is sooo much better than ESXi.
I didn't even bother trying to get my NVR VM (Agent DVR) resurrected, because there is a Kubernetes version of it in the catalog. I had it up and running in 5 minutes, imported my config and was viewing cameras within a minute. Wow again!
For disks, I had 4x1TB SATA SSDs in the ESXi box in RAID5 config using the 440ar controller in the DL360, giving me about 2.6TB. I also had a bunch of proper Enterprise SAS Hard disks left over from an old job, small capacity, 300 and 146GB that were unused. I split the SSDs into two for each box, and also put in a few of the spinny disks just to test with. The controllers went into HBA mode, and so both SCALE and CORE boxes have SSD and HD storage.
I rapidly realized that the network was the limiting factor, I was getting 118MB/s from clients, so saturating the 1Gb links. I tried aggregating a couple of them (the DL360s have 4x1Gb on-board), but what I had not realized is that with 2x1Gb in LAG config, you don't really get 2Gb per flow, because each flow (for example sending a 10Gb file to the NAS) will only use one 1Gb link. The advantage of configuring the LAG group is that you could have two clients doing that at the same time. That's not my use case, I wanted rapid file transfer of large files from one client to the NAS.
Off to eBay again and picked up a couple of HP530 2x10Gb NICs for the princely sum of $40 each, delivered. Including SFPs. They're only PCIe Gen 2, but with 8 lanes, that's plenty. My switch had 8x 10Gb ports just sitting there, and I had the SFPs for it and fiber patch cables in a box of "I might need these some day" stuff :) The NICs were brand new, never used, as were the SFPs. These would have been $1000 NICs when they were current HPE models.
Back to the disks... so I took a punt. The SSDs (plain old WD blue) were faster than the spinny disks, obviously, and use way less power. So I bought 16x 2TB cheap SSDs from China on eBay. I'm waiting for these to be delivered. While I don't expect much from them, I also doubt there is a plant in China with a sign outside that says "we make terrible SSDs". We'll see, as I said, a bit of a punt. I can always re-sell them, if they're that bad.
Anyway, there's my introduction. 1x TrueNAS SCALE, 1x TrueNAS CORE.
Looking forward to being part of the community!
For a year or two now, I've had a VMWare ESXi (free version) installation on the rig that is now my SCALE box. I was running 3D printer control software and using it as an NVR for security cameras at home. The hardware was an HP DL360 G9 that I bought two of on eBay for ridiculously cheap (like $275 ea). I was originally going to sell the other one to recoup some of the money, but then thought it was a good source of spares, at the very least, so kept it. Getting more into photography and videos, I realized I needed to up my game on storage, so I thought I'd set up the spare one as a NAS box. Enter FreeNAS, which I then realized was now TrueNAS CORE.
Well... after installing CORE, it was like night and day compared with ESXi for my use case. I was running 7u3, which looks like something from the 90s to be honest. CORE's GUI is just beautiful, responsive and easy to use. I didn't actually realize that it had virtualization capability, and I ran up a couple of Ubuntu Server test VMs, and it was quite easy, although the Bhyve framework is a bit Noddy in comparison to ESXi. But it's a NAS box, not really a virtualization platform.
After the epiphany, I thought "why not" - I backed up my VMs on the ESXi platform, blew it away and installed SCALE on it. Wow! Even better feature set, with three different ways to run apps - Kubernetes, Docker and full OS virtualization, as well as the ZFS NAS features of CORE. Holy cow, this is sooo much better than ESXi.
I didn't even bother trying to get my NVR VM (Agent DVR) resurrected, because there is a Kubernetes version of it in the catalog. I had it up and running in 5 minutes, imported my config and was viewing cameras within a minute. Wow again!
For disks, I had 4x1TB SATA SSDs in the ESXi box in RAID5 config using the 440ar controller in the DL360, giving me about 2.6TB. I also had a bunch of proper Enterprise SAS Hard disks left over from an old job, small capacity, 300 and 146GB that were unused. I split the SSDs into two for each box, and also put in a few of the spinny disks just to test with. The controllers went into HBA mode, and so both SCALE and CORE boxes have SSD and HD storage.
I rapidly realized that the network was the limiting factor, I was getting 118MB/s from clients, so saturating the 1Gb links. I tried aggregating a couple of them (the DL360s have 4x1Gb on-board), but what I had not realized is that with 2x1Gb in LAG config, you don't really get 2Gb per flow, because each flow (for example sending a 10Gb file to the NAS) will only use one 1Gb link. The advantage of configuring the LAG group is that you could have two clients doing that at the same time. That's not my use case, I wanted rapid file transfer of large files from one client to the NAS.
Off to eBay again and picked up a couple of HP530 2x10Gb NICs for the princely sum of $40 each, delivered. Including SFPs. They're only PCIe Gen 2, but with 8 lanes, that's plenty. My switch had 8x 10Gb ports just sitting there, and I had the SFPs for it and fiber patch cables in a box of "I might need these some day" stuff :) The NICs were brand new, never used, as were the SFPs. These would have been $1000 NICs when they were current HPE models.
Back to the disks... so I took a punt. The SSDs (plain old WD blue) were faster than the spinny disks, obviously, and use way less power. So I bought 16x 2TB cheap SSDs from China on eBay. I'm waiting for these to be delivered. While I don't expect much from them, I also doubt there is a plant in China with a sign outside that says "we make terrible SSDs". We'll see, as I said, a bit of a punt. I can always re-sell them, if they're that bad.
Anyway, there's my introduction. 1x TrueNAS SCALE, 1x TrueNAS CORE.
Looking forward to being part of the community!
