Deploying two TrueNas Scale servers

[Selassie]

I would like to upgrade my existing Truenas Core machine, Server 1 (which currently acts as a storage server) to Truenas Scale and connect a second machine with Truenas Scale, server 2 (much faster processor, memory etc) to run my Apps.

How easy or difficult would it be for the servers to communicate and share storage where the apps on server 2, access the data on server 1 to read and write to it?

 

[kbftech]

 

[Ericloewe]

You can forget doing this with two machines, unless you want to do things yourself (at which point, Scale brings little to the table). If you want to use Gluster, you'll need a minimum of three machines (identical if you want uptime, otherwise the third can be simpler). To create/manage the storage, you'll need TrueCommand.

Of course, if you want to use storage from only one server, just mount whatever you need on the client and do whatever you need there. It's not particularly supported by TrueNAS, though, and you'd be better off with a non-TrueNAS client in many cases.

 

[kbftech]

Allright thanks a lot for the very fast answer :)

I guess I'll simply go with an Hypervisor (ProxMox probably) for the apps and use Trunas as storage/backup!

Thanks again!

 

[jamztiberius]

super late reply, but I did basically the same thing and filled the newer machine with SSD storage for a game vault and for the apps to run. I then set up the spinning disk storage on the old machine to use NFS shares. From their you just set up each app on the new machine to use the NFS share for their storage instead of using a host path.

 

[kbftech]

super late reply, but I did basically the same thing and filled the newer machine with SSD storage for a game vault and for the apps to run. I then set up the spinning disk storage on the old machine to use NFS shares. From their you just set up each app on the new machine to use the NFS share for their storage instead of using a host path.

Works well for you?

I ended up doing something similar, except that I put sas drives in 3 mirrors of 2 drives for the OSes on the new machine running proxmox and created a pool of 3 mirrors of 2 larger sata drives paired with 3 x 1tb ssds as L2 cache (I maxed out RAM and though arc level 2 might help if many users load the same game often). I enabled dedup and shared using ISCSI.

On proxmox, I created my model machine, updates, drivers, apps and everything and then saved it as a template. I then created linked clones, renamed the machines, set static IPs, bound an ISCSI drive for each, logged in steam users and probably some other tweaks I'm forgetting.

This setup means each machine uses almost no space for the OS as they're identical linked clones. As for the steam library, since dedup is activated, once a library is filled with games, any other machine installing the same game isn't using any space either.

Note that I did create multiple VMs for remote gaming but I also use ISCSI shares for libraries of physical gaming computers as well.

So far this works pretty well although I'm not getting the best results now that I've moved all my library there. I have many, many games and since the other accounts don't, I'm not saving 25 times the space.

Everything is linked through 10gbps so no bottleneck there. The two servers have a dedicated10gbps link (ad-hoc, DAC cable, different subnet) just to be sure there is no interference from other lan operations.

Works well so far but it wasn't as simple, fast nor efficient space-wise as I hoped. It was a nice learning exercice though and I don't regret the setup. I guess I could host hundreds of vm's/desktops worth of data with this architecture if I needed to.