Few questions

[choman]

I tried searching for my questions but just can't find the answers so I am making this post. Apologies if there is
a suitable answer via the search, which means I am not coming up with great search terms.

To start off with, I am excited to begin my truenas journey with a newly purchased mini XL+ (nas from here on). I also consult on the side
and looking to promote the mini XL+ to at least 2 businesses. I will create an intro post in the upcoming days and I hope
not to bore people :)

HARDWARE:
- Can someone to point me to the Mini XL+ Qualified RAM support page, I would like to bump from 32G to 64G
- I did see the qualified drive page, but is there a community driven qualified HDD page available (for next question)?
- I have spare seagate exos x12 and x14 drives, can these be used in the Mini XL+
- I heard stories that the drives get too hot in the Mini XL+?
- is this true?
- are there any good solutions?

EXPANSION:
- If I only populate 2-4 bays to start with, and add 2-4 more drives later
- do the automatically come into the poll and become available for use?
- can I mix-match drive sizes?
- If i have my nas fully populated with drives
- hot swappable for larger drives?
- auto expanded and brought into the pool

EXCRYPTION:
- One of my clients requires that full drive encryption is used for data at rest. I did see something in my searching that
said SED(s) are the only full disk encryption supported. is this true? or is there also support for zfs "based" encryption
of even LUKS?
- Then I have the questions under EXPANSION but for fully encrypted drives. I guess I should also ask is the "answer"
is applicable to both SED drives and the before mentioned zfs/luks encryption


Again, if these answers are in the forums (sure they are) I need to come up with better search terms

 

[danb35]

- I have spare seagate exos x12 and x14 drives, can these be used in the Mini XL+

Yes; any 3.5" SATA CMR drives will work. NAS and enterprise drives are generally a good bet. Again, CMR.

- If I only populate 2-4 bays to start with, and add 2-4 more drives later
- do the automatically come into the poll and become available for use?

Not automatically, but you can add them to the pool.

- can I mix-match drive sizes?

Sure

- If i have my nas fully populated with drives
- hot swappable for larger drives?

Sure

- auto expanded and brought into the pool

Depends on what you mean by "auto". You need to tell TrueNAS to replace the old (removed) disk with the new (larger) one. The rest of the process is automatic.

- One of my clients requires that full drive encryption is used for data at rest. I did see something in my searching that said SED(s) are the only full disk encryption supported. is this true? or is there also support for zfs "based" encryption of even LUKS?

ZFS encryption is supported; this can be at the pool or dataset level. Expansion works the same with or without encryption.

 

[Arwen]

@choman - I highly recommend "playing" with TrueNAS first. Perhaps in a Virtual Box VM, (which is not recommended for production!).

Get familiar with the GUI and command line. Read up on ZFS, (as it appears ZFS is new to you), as it is really different from everything that came before it. ZFS has a great many good, solid features, but also has some gotchas. Like can't shrink or expand the number of disks in a RAID-Zx vDev.

If you are truly going to support TrueNAS in other business, then it is best to plan out your configuration. Even to the point of burn in memory, then disks. Make a written plan, (which will be constantly updated), of how you configured each client's NAS. Then, if you need to make a new one, you have notes. A lot of work, and you will miss steps, but this will be both a reminder and learning experience.

 

[Redcoat]

With respect to HDD choices for the XL+, you may find this thread informative: https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/new-truenas-mini-xl-drive-temperatures-really-hot.104433/

 

[Dice]

As you seem a novice to TN/zfs, and the servers are intended for clients, I suggest spending some time familiarizing with the "freak-out" scenarios, and how they play out in practice. Because - it is easy to navigate when knowledgeable and experienced, but is not "look for the next OK button to press to keep forward in a process with guard rails.

That is, at the very least - simulate a drive failure and do a full replace.
There are numerous other 'edgecases' where things "go partly wrong" where it is good to have some experience in fiddling with.
Forexample, full recovery from a dead boot device?
* including what's needed to make the process a breeze vs a nightmare.

I'd also suggest having a look at, and think through a suitable setup for snapshot&retention policy out the gate.
And quotas for space utilization, and its gotchas. It is actually possible to deadlock a full pool, to the point where you cannot delete files, and cannot recover short from an entire pool rebuild.

Easily preventable, but anyone attempting to make any sort of profit from TN, should at least instill basic hygiene in their offering.

 

[Davvo]

With respect to HDD choices for the XL+, you may find this thread informative: https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/new-truenas-mini-xl-drive-temperatures-really-hot.104433/

TL;DR: don't use 7200 or greater RPM drives and stick with 5900 or lower RPM ones.

 

[Samuel Tai]

@choman, I would strongly recommend you not start any businesses supporting Mini XL+s until you understand the hardware platform and TrueNAS much, much better, and have successfully worked through several oopses. If you don't know what you're doing, it's very possible to mouse slip and do something unrecoverable. See this thread for someone else who thought they could provide a TrueNAS offering before having the requisite skills and knowledge.

What a disaster Replication task done!

I'm running a small startup team doing math education related, and store all the files on the nextcloud which mount a nfs share from truenas in last three years. I'm setting up a new server today. and want to migrate some dataset between servers. Unfortunitely, i used the replication task...

www.truenas.com

Now they'll probably be on the receiving end of a lawsuit from the school districts that have lost data, and will likely be blacklisted from ever being a service provider in their area. Professional and personal bankruptcy is in their future.

 

[Davvo]

@choman, I would strongly recommend you not start any businesses supporting Mini XL+s until you understand the hardware platform and TrueNAS much, much better, and have successfully worked through several oopses. If you don't know what you're doing, it's very possible to mouse slip and do something unrecoverable. See this thread for someone else who thought they could provide a TrueNAS offering before having the requisite skills and knowledge.

What a disaster Replication task done!

I'm running a small startup team doing math education related, and store all the files on the nextcloud which mount a nfs share from truenas in last three years. I'm setting up a new server today. and want to migrate some dataset between servers. Unfortunitely, i used the replication task...

www.truenas.com

Now they'll probably be on the receiving end of a lawsuit from the school districts that have lost data, and will likely be blacklisted from ever being a service provider in their area. Professional and personal bankruptcy is in their future.

Oh gosh, I completely missed that thread. Rest in peace.