TrueNas under ESXi and precautions

[jamiec1]

Newbie to TrueNas here

As per the info @

TrueNAS enables Container Storage and Kubernetes

The Democratic CSI driver integrates ZFS and TrueNAS into the Kubernetes environment and other container management platforms.

www.ixsystems.com

I have created raw disks for my 2x4TB drives from ESXi v7.0 U1 to pass them through directly to the TrueNas VM

Do I still need to disable the scrub tasks in ZFS as per the above link ?
And about write caching, I assume this doesn't matter now ?
I am not using RAID from my server

TIA

 

[jgreco]

You are not using RAID, but you're asking about write caching? How do you "create[d] raw disks" and how do you "pass them through directly"?

I would totally disregard the iXsystems blog post and look at the resources here on the forum that will help you virtualize correctly and safely.

https://www.truenas.com/community/t...ide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.12714/

 

[RegularJoe]

The only way to do it is to have a LSI SAS HBA with the right firmware and you pass that PCIe HBA from the OS to your VM. You must have VT-D enabled and with VMware 7.0 I have had issues where if you install FreeNAS/TrueNAS and tell it the guest OS is FreeBSD 12 you are in for a rough ride. Be accurate and if the FreeNAS OS is FreeBSD 11 x64 then make sure you tell VMware that is the case.

RDM on VMware and RAID cards are a curse as well as SVR-IO unless you have enterprise gear and know what your doing and why.

I run all tasks on my physical disks, what I do disable is smart on a VMware virtual disk that resides on a VMFS datastore as the smart values would be useless as it is a virutal device, in times past it would make the SMART service fail to start.

 

[jgreco]

To re-emphasize that, RDM caused numerous disasters with many sad sacks who came to the forums looking for recovery help that was not to be had. It was one of a small number of reasons I wrote the "Please don't run FreeNAS as a VM in production" sticky.

 

[RegularJoe]

RDM on vmware has been cursed from day one. Anyone who has used it has come beck even to vmware crying.

 

[mstang1988]

Newbie to TrueNas here

As per the info @

TrueNAS enables Container Storage and Kubernetes

The Democratic CSI driver integrates ZFS and TrueNAS into the Kubernetes environment and other container management platforms.

www.ixsystems.com

I have created raw disks for my 2x4TB drives from ESXi v7.0 U1 to pass them through directly to the TrueNas VM

Do I still need to disable the scrub tasks in ZFS as per the above link ?
And about write caching, I assume this doesn't matter now ?
I am not using RAID from my server

TIA

Why not utilize PCI(e) passthrough? Doing so effectively gives the VM native access to the hardware (by more or less mapping the PCI address space to the VM). The big benefit is you don't have a metalayer between the disks and the VM when done.

 

[jamiec1]

The only way to do it is to have a LSI SAS HBA with the right firmware and you pass that PCIe HBA from the OS to your VM. You must have VT-D enabled and with VMware 7.0 I have had issues where if you install FreeNAS/TrueNAS and tell it the guest OS is FreeBSD 12 you are in for a rough ride. Be accurate and if the FreeNAS OS is FreeBSD 11 x64 then make sure you tell VMware that is the case.

RDM on VMware and RAID cards are a curse as well as SVR-IO unless you have enterprise gear and know what your doing and why.

I run all tasks on my physical disks, what I do disable is smart on a VMware virtual disk that resides on a VMFS datastore as the smart values would be useless as it is a virutal device, in times past it would make the SMART service fail to start.

I am using TrusNas Core 12.0-u1 does that use FreeBSD v12 also ? I assume so but I am not sure

 

[jamiec1]

Having read through all of this I have learnt a lot

I think i'll have to invest in the Smart array controller for this server, it is an HPE Microserver Gen 10+
I initially tried the passthrough but ESXi was greyed out and had nothing to select. I think I need the external card HPE Smart Array E208i-p SR Gen10