TruNas Core on ESXi 7 VM - NFS Share?

[stanjiii]

I am looking into ways to share a large amount of data as read-only to several client VMs across an ESXi host.

The VMs run software that will need to access the various types of data at different times and possibly at the same time.

Can TruNas be used for tis as in,,

EX:

on an ESXi host,
a vSwitch with an uplink to a physical switch for the client VMs so they can be accessed from a developer network - call it port-group (DEV-NET).
Most developers will have ssh access to VMs or use a Web Browser to login to vCenter and access a Developer-Only folder in vCenter.

Another vSwitch not uplinked to a port on a switch that would have a access to the TrueNAS VM - call it port-group (NAS-DATA).

The client VMs then will have two vNICs assigned in settings -
one to the outside allowing access to the VMs (DEV-NET)
one for the data on the inside (NAS-DATA) where TruNAS resides.

Can I create a 1.5 TB VMDK on TruNAS and make it available read-only to the client VMs via an NFS share from TruNAS?

If so, do the VMs then need to issue a amount command to access the read-only data or can that be set on TruNAS?

thanks

 

[jgreco]

Virtual machines are not magic. If you could do it with bare metal machines, you can do it with physical machines. If you want to virtualize the TrueNAS host, make sure you do it correctly:

Resource - "Absolutely must virtualize TrueNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

[---- 2024/01/16: Still relevant. Virtualization really doesn't change much. Updates made as appropriate. ----] [---- 2018/02/27: This is still as relevant as ever. As PCIe-Passthru has matured, fewer problems are reported. I've updated some...

www.truenas.com

VMDK's are not really shareable very easily unless you really know what you are doing with the hypervisor.

 

[stanjiii]

yes, sharing VMDKs is not and easy method. vSpehre 7 did add SCSI-3 PR support on VMFS, allowing for shared VMDKs to be used with WSFC on VMFS. But, that is not trivial and not what we really need.

To further define the environment ,
Dell ME4024 SAN (24 TB of SSDs in RAID5 split into two volumes)
Two Dell r750s with (2) Intel Gold 6336Y CPUs connected to the the Dell ME4024 with direct-connect SAS 12GB cables
ESXi 7.0 on the r750s and managed by vCenter 7.0
Two volumes on the Dell ME4024 are for the ESXi Datastores that house VMs

We are not going to be creating VMs on the NAS.
We need an area to share 1.5 TB (RO) of data on the ESXi host to make available to VMs.
This is not critical data. The data to be shared of the NAS can be reloaded and the VMs are backed up with Veeam.
This would include the FreeNAS VM.

It sounds like what I need is possible, following guidelines especially under Key Concepts for a "Small Virtualized NAS" ?

There is another option for us, which is to configure a NFS Linux server VM (ubuntu) and then have the client VMs access it via exports,,

I am wondering if FreeNAS gains us anything vs the NFS Linux server VM method?

​

 

[jgreco]

I am wondering if FreeNAS gains us anything vs the NFS Linux server VM method?

Maybe. Maybe not. TrueNAS is likely to be more performant if you resource the system appropriately, because more stuff will end up being cached in many cases. But it's hard to know.