TrueNAS Storage layout advise

[Fred974]

Hi,

I am building a TrueNAS system with 1x Dell PowerEdge R610 as host. Attached to it are
1x Dell PowerVault MD1200 (12x 3TB LFF HDD)
1x Dell PowerVault MD1220 (24x 1TB SFF HDD)

The storage are connected via daisy chain and the connected to TrueNAS host on IT mode HBA card.

The purpose the the storage is to store XCP-NG VM and also to be used as backup storage backend for our windows computer.

Could anyone please advise if I should put both PowerVault into 1 big pool or will I be better creating 1x pool per PowerVault ?

The next question is: if I set 2x pool and use the 24x bays storage for xcp-ng (because I could upgrade to ssd later) what is the best disk layout for performance?

My understanding is that I need mirrors for performance. So setting the 24x bay storage as 8 three-disk mirror vdevs is what I would assume is the best to do but not sure.

If I use the 12x LFF storage as backup, what type of layout should I be looking at? My tough was 1x pool of 12 HDD in raidz2 but very not sure on that one.

The plan is to use NFS so I can have thin provisioning.

Thank you all in advance.

 

[sretalla]

The purpose the the storage is to store XCP-NG VM and also to be used as backup storage backend for our windows computer.

Since those 2 purposes are more-or-less not very compatible in terms of having the same pool topology, you will be better having a pool for each purpose.

The pool for VMs should use mirrors (https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/the-path-to-success-for-block-storage.81165/)

I would expect you will be much better served by 2-way mirrors with 2 spares in the pool than 3-way mirrors... giving you 11 VDEVs and 2 spares.

For the backups, 2 VDEVs of RAIDZ2 would probably do the job... if it's really just a backup, maybe you can get away with RAIDZ1 and the knowledge that you'll need to rebuild sometimes if a drive fails during resilver... depends on your RPO/RTO agreements.