EasyGoing1
Dabbler
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2021
- Messages
- 42
(my questions are at the bottom of this post if you wanna skip my discussion)
I've got TrueNAS installed in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine (Fusion updated to the latest version as of today). I then created 4 virtual hard drives via virtual SATA bus just to get a feel of how the NAS works.
I went into Pools and then went to add a pool and the first thing I noticed was how TrueNAS offers drive pooling based mainly on function and not RAID type ... then I realized that TrueNAS only seems to offer ZFS Raiding. While this isn't a problem, it was interesting nonetheless...
I looked at the manual options for creating a pool and the option that really piqued my interest was the dedupe option, though I couldn't seem to spec a config for it that did not include two drives for dedupe where I did not get a warning saying that the configuration was not safe - using a single drive in the dedupe area gave the red flag, while two drives didn't.
So I opted to just go with the default recommendation using all four drives for the pool, which I believe was RAID-Z3?? Not sure ...
Next, I created a volume that I intended to share for an iScsi test and was surprised to see that it doesn't like it when you try to make the size of the volume larger than 80% of the available storage. Which I could override, but I'm looking to test RECOMMENDED configurations here ...
I then went into shares and created an iSCSI target using the volume I created, I initiated a connection with the iSCSI target on my MBP then formatted it with APFS.
Then I transferred some files just to see how everything worked and though I was only getting 6MB / second data transfer, that was to be expected since the VM is using the same NIC (single Gigabit via a USB-C Nic adapter) as my Mac and it's all running on the same machine ... those transfer speeds seem reasonable to me.
Initial thoughts are that the whole process was very straight forward and TrueNAS made it easy to use the "I don't know what I'm doing, just do it for me" method as well as providing the option to configure at least some of the more detailed parameters involved with each needed step. Though I think it would be a nice feature for less technical users to offer some kind of a "wizard menu" that would offer canned configurations like "take these raw drives that aren't configured yet and use as much as space as you can while offering a single drive redundancy and give me an ISCSI target that I can connect to" ... something along those lines ... but that's just my thoughts on making things, even more, user friendly.
Here are my questions:
1) I haven't read up on it yet, so even if someone responds with a link to where I can learn would be great, but when I saw DEDUPE in the pool options, I started salivating. The idea that I could create a space to write data to where the file system ensures that no duplicate data is ever written to the space while still presenting the illusion that it does: ie if I have a file in one folder then later on I end up copying that same file to another folder, it would still appear to me to be in two different places yet the back end file system only kept a single copy of the file ... if THAT is how deduplication works, then that is what I want. But what threw me off was the need to add drives to the dedupe config. I obviously don't understand how deduplication is implemented in TrueNAS and my thoughts on how it works are apparently not in harmony with how it actually works. Can someone who understands that technology enlighten me?
2) Why does TrueNAS prefer that we NOT create volumes that utilize more than 80% of the available space in the file system? What am I missing when I assume that I should be able to use all of my drive space for shared volumes?
3) Is it considered "best practice" or is it even any sort of issue, which way I choose to format an iSCSI target? I went with Apple's default of APFS, but I'm wondering if there are caveats to choosing one format over another?
4) Does TrueNAS subscribe to the notion that when creating a RAID volume, ZFS is the only way to go, and if you want any other type of raid, then you need to provide your own hardware card for that or simply install third-party software that will create different kinds of raids?
I haven't messed with a NAS in almost 10 years except for some Synology boxes a few years ago, so obviously I've missed out on NAS implementation "theory" or "best practices" over that time. I'm willing to read up on things on my own but I always like to ask those who are involved for the best sources to find that knowledge which is mainly why I created this post.
Thank you,
Mike
I've got TrueNAS installed in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine (Fusion updated to the latest version as of today). I then created 4 virtual hard drives via virtual SATA bus just to get a feel of how the NAS works.
I went into Pools and then went to add a pool and the first thing I noticed was how TrueNAS offers drive pooling based mainly on function and not RAID type ... then I realized that TrueNAS only seems to offer ZFS Raiding. While this isn't a problem, it was interesting nonetheless...
I looked at the manual options for creating a pool and the option that really piqued my interest was the dedupe option, though I couldn't seem to spec a config for it that did not include two drives for dedupe where I did not get a warning saying that the configuration was not safe - using a single drive in the dedupe area gave the red flag, while two drives didn't.
So I opted to just go with the default recommendation using all four drives for the pool, which I believe was RAID-Z3?? Not sure ...
Next, I created a volume that I intended to share for an iScsi test and was surprised to see that it doesn't like it when you try to make the size of the volume larger than 80% of the available storage. Which I could override, but I'm looking to test RECOMMENDED configurations here ...
I then went into shares and created an iSCSI target using the volume I created, I initiated a connection with the iSCSI target on my MBP then formatted it with APFS.
Then I transferred some files just to see how everything worked and though I was only getting 6MB / second data transfer, that was to be expected since the VM is using the same NIC (single Gigabit via a USB-C Nic adapter) as my Mac and it's all running on the same machine ... those transfer speeds seem reasonable to me.
Initial thoughts are that the whole process was very straight forward and TrueNAS made it easy to use the "I don't know what I'm doing, just do it for me" method as well as providing the option to configure at least some of the more detailed parameters involved with each needed step. Though I think it would be a nice feature for less technical users to offer some kind of a "wizard menu" that would offer canned configurations like "take these raw drives that aren't configured yet and use as much as space as you can while offering a single drive redundancy and give me an ISCSI target that I can connect to" ... something along those lines ... but that's just my thoughts on making things, even more, user friendly.
Here are my questions:
1) I haven't read up on it yet, so even if someone responds with a link to where I can learn would be great, but when I saw DEDUPE in the pool options, I started salivating. The idea that I could create a space to write data to where the file system ensures that no duplicate data is ever written to the space while still presenting the illusion that it does: ie if I have a file in one folder then later on I end up copying that same file to another folder, it would still appear to me to be in two different places yet the back end file system only kept a single copy of the file ... if THAT is how deduplication works, then that is what I want. But what threw me off was the need to add drives to the dedupe config. I obviously don't understand how deduplication is implemented in TrueNAS and my thoughts on how it works are apparently not in harmony with how it actually works. Can someone who understands that technology enlighten me?
2) Why does TrueNAS prefer that we NOT create volumes that utilize more than 80% of the available space in the file system? What am I missing when I assume that I should be able to use all of my drive space for shared volumes?
3) Is it considered "best practice" or is it even any sort of issue, which way I choose to format an iSCSI target? I went with Apple's default of APFS, but I'm wondering if there are caveats to choosing one format over another?
4) Does TrueNAS subscribe to the notion that when creating a RAID volume, ZFS is the only way to go, and if you want any other type of raid, then you need to provide your own hardware card for that or simply install third-party software that will create different kinds of raids?
I haven't messed with a NAS in almost 10 years except for some Synology boxes a few years ago, so obviously I've missed out on NAS implementation "theory" or "best practices" over that time. I'm willing to read up on things on my own but I always like to ask those who are involved for the best sources to find that knowledge which is mainly why I created this post.
Thank you,
Mike