I have a pair of FreeNAS servers named FreeNAS02 & FreeNAS03. They are identical hardware-wise:
FreeNAS02 replicated to FreeNAS03. This *seems* to be working correctly.
-SamM
- Dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2440
- 96Gb ECC RAM
- One pool named "Mech_Pool_1":
- Twelve Seagate Exos 10Tb 7200 RPM SATA (I get minor issues with these on old LSI controllers, but that's another story)
- Four sets of 3-way mirrors
- Crucial MX500 500Gb M.2 read cache
- Twin Intel Optane DC P4801X 100GB NVMe SLOG
- Twelve Seagate Exos 10Tb 7200 RPM SATA (I get minor issues with these on old LSI controllers, but that's another story)
- Chelsio 4-port 10Gb NIC
- SAN1a
- SAN1b
- Empty
- Replication (direct connection to other FreeNAS server)
FreeNAS02 replicated to FreeNAS03. This *seems* to be working correctly.
- I've set up Periodic Snapshot Tasks on FreeNAS02.
- I've set up Replication Tasks on FreeNAS02
- Originally, I used "Mech_Pool_1/Replication From FreeNAS02" as the "Remote ZFS Pool/Dataset".
- The first issue I found was when I tried to mount snapshots & clones of snapshots on FreeNAS03 as iSCSI extents. Despite my best efforts, I ran into issues until I finally figured out that the path name was too long.
- I have since started using "Mech_Pool_1/Repl_FN02" instead. Now I can clone snapshots on FreeNAS03, and add them as iSCSI extents.
- Snapshots from FreeNAS02 seem to be replicating correctly to FreeNAS03, which was always the case. But when I go to "Snapshots" on FreeNAS03, select a snapshot (example - Dataset: Mech_Pool_1/Repl_FN02/DS-Alpha/DS-Alpha.FileSvr-DS1 - Snapshot: auto-20200504.0155-2w), and click "Clone to new dataset", this creates a new item under pools (assuming a shorten the default clone name) which I can add as an iSCSI extent.
- One thing I've noticed is that I cannot create the clone to a lower dataset than "Mech_Pool_1/Repl_FN02/". Every time I've tried, it look like it worked, but then the dataset is missing under Pools.
- I eventually found info on FreeNAS'es file path/name character limits, and that names/paths more than 63/88 characters reaks weird issues on iSCSI extents. For me, I've found that getting names/paths down even to 60 characters STILL doesn't work, but that 58 character names do, so YMMV...
- I take this new iSCSI extent, and share it out via iSCSI like I do any other iSCSI share. I configure a Windows VM to mount this LUN, but Windows always reports it as Read Only. This is where I'm stuck.
- My goal is to use FreeNAS03 as a disaster recovery option for FreeNAS02. But so far, it can't be used as such because the iSCSI shares all come out as read only.
-SamM
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