Hello,
OK, a little history first (note: home-setup):
Long time ago I had a single NAS only. Then I got my 4U server, put many disks in it, installed virtual TrueNAS Core on ESXi, and via HBA, connected all disks to TrueNAS.
Now, I am trying to find a best solution to access data on these disks.
At first, I started with simple SMB and NFS shares. While that worked, I had issues with permissions when some tools copied stuff from my external NAS (Synology) to TrueNAS. Besides, I like LUN better.
And idea was born to use iSCSI and prepare a target for a single windows server. I knew I could either connect ESXi to it or Windows directly.
At first I tried ESXi, put a VMDK on it, and copied couple of TB worth of data onto it. Well, fair performance, was working well.
But one issue: if I reboot the server, manually, and then let VMs auto-start, I would have to rescan adapters, so that my windows file server can even start, otherwise the datastore in ESXi (that is bound to TrueNAS iSCSI target) remains disconnected. Only after manual rescan after TrueNAS has booted, would I have my datastore, and file server would start.
Then I had an idea to create a 2nd data store on TrueNAS, over NFS. Migrated the disk from iSCSI to NFS.
Now I have terrible performance. Writes at about 20-30MB/s, reads only 90MB/s.
Now I strongly believe that the only viable solution is to bind windows server directly to the iSCSI target, completely omitting ESXi.
Or do you have any other ideas?
Thanks
Kosta
OK, a little history first (note: home-setup):
Long time ago I had a single NAS only. Then I got my 4U server, put many disks in it, installed virtual TrueNAS Core on ESXi, and via HBA, connected all disks to TrueNAS.
Now, I am trying to find a best solution to access data on these disks.
At first, I started with simple SMB and NFS shares. While that worked, I had issues with permissions when some tools copied stuff from my external NAS (Synology) to TrueNAS. Besides, I like LUN better.
And idea was born to use iSCSI and prepare a target for a single windows server. I knew I could either connect ESXi to it or Windows directly.
At first I tried ESXi, put a VMDK on it, and copied couple of TB worth of data onto it. Well, fair performance, was working well.
But one issue: if I reboot the server, manually, and then let VMs auto-start, I would have to rescan adapters, so that my windows file server can even start, otherwise the datastore in ESXi (that is bound to TrueNAS iSCSI target) remains disconnected. Only after manual rescan after TrueNAS has booted, would I have my datastore, and file server would start.
Then I had an idea to create a 2nd data store on TrueNAS, over NFS. Migrated the disk from iSCSI to NFS.
Now I have terrible performance. Writes at about 20-30MB/s, reads only 90MB/s.
Now I strongly believe that the only viable solution is to bind windows server directly to the iSCSI target, completely omitting ESXi.
Or do you have any other ideas?
Thanks
Kosta