I set up a TrueNAS Core system a long while ago, mainly to have a resilient NAS device for my home and business needs.
Let's call this "Core-Archive", as lots of my other devices like my work laptops, main PC, video editing machine etc used it exactly for that purpose.
I decided to streamline my workflows and I set up a new TrueNAS Scale system that runs several VMs that has effectively replaced some of my older physical devices. Let's call this machine "Scale". Core and Scale have the latest versions of the respective systems.
Core and Scale have very similar hardware specs.
They both have a HP Workstation (Z440) motherboard, Core has 64GB DDR4 ecc and Scale has 128GB DDR4 ecc.
Core has one pool of 12x 8tb mechanical drives in RAIDZ-2 (uses a simple PCIe SATA card)
Scale has one pool of 4x 18tb drives in RAIDZ-1 (again, a simple PCIe SATA card) and one pool of 4x NVMe drives (M2 form) sitting on a 4-port PCIe card.
On Scale the pool of NVMe drives is where the VMs live.
On the two machines the pools of mechanical drives are just massive file storage areas, with datasets set up as SMB shares, and both are kept identical.
So I get resiliency from ZFS and backup by maintaining a copy of the data held in Scale.
I am increasingly paranoid that I need to find a way to manage any hardware failures.
I have spare 8tb, 18tb and NVMe drives, so that's the thing that worries me the least - I would just replace any dead drives and re-silver the pools, without a huge amount of downtime.
But in case of a motherboard or PSU failure, this will be a bigger problem.
I actually have 2 spare Z440 motherboards and two space PSUs, but I cannot afford the downtime a rebuild requires.
So here is my question.
Is it possible to upgrade my Core machine to Scale, and make a complete clone of the existing Scale machine?
I have a spare set of 4x NVMe drives and 4-port PCIe card so that I can replicate an almost identical spec to the Scale machine.
Why do I want to have a complete clone? So that if the first machine dies, for whatever reason, be it easy or hard to fix, I can simply use the second machine to minimise downtime.
The second machine will continue to be a backup of the first machine (ie the two pools of mechanical drives will have all my backed data). But's it's the VMs on the current Scale machine that I need to be highly available, just have them copies / replicated to the second machine and turned them on in if needed.
Thank you for your help.
Let's call this "Core-Archive", as lots of my other devices like my work laptops, main PC, video editing machine etc used it exactly for that purpose.
I decided to streamline my workflows and I set up a new TrueNAS Scale system that runs several VMs that has effectively replaced some of my older physical devices. Let's call this machine "Scale". Core and Scale have the latest versions of the respective systems.
Core and Scale have very similar hardware specs.
They both have a HP Workstation (Z440) motherboard, Core has 64GB DDR4 ecc and Scale has 128GB DDR4 ecc.
Core has one pool of 12x 8tb mechanical drives in RAIDZ-2 (uses a simple PCIe SATA card)
Scale has one pool of 4x 18tb drives in RAIDZ-1 (again, a simple PCIe SATA card) and one pool of 4x NVMe drives (M2 form) sitting on a 4-port PCIe card.
On Scale the pool of NVMe drives is where the VMs live.
On the two machines the pools of mechanical drives are just massive file storage areas, with datasets set up as SMB shares, and both are kept identical.
So I get resiliency from ZFS and backup by maintaining a copy of the data held in Scale.
I am increasingly paranoid that I need to find a way to manage any hardware failures.
I have spare 8tb, 18tb and NVMe drives, so that's the thing that worries me the least - I would just replace any dead drives and re-silver the pools, without a huge amount of downtime.
But in case of a motherboard or PSU failure, this will be a bigger problem.
I actually have 2 spare Z440 motherboards and two space PSUs, but I cannot afford the downtime a rebuild requires.
So here is my question.
Is it possible to upgrade my Core machine to Scale, and make a complete clone of the existing Scale machine?
I have a spare set of 4x NVMe drives and 4-port PCIe card so that I can replicate an almost identical spec to the Scale machine.
Why do I want to have a complete clone? So that if the first machine dies, for whatever reason, be it easy or hard to fix, I can simply use the second machine to minimise downtime.
The second machine will continue to be a backup of the first machine (ie the two pools of mechanical drives will have all my backed data). But's it's the VMs on the current Scale machine that I need to be highly available, just have them copies / replicated to the second machine and turned them on in if needed.
Thank you for your help.
