Got 32GB's of ram, only uses 1GB tops. why?

[unf0rg0tt3n]

Hey guys,

I'm new to freenas, got it working though. Loving it so far, but I got a issue.
My system:
mobo: supermicro X9DRL-iF
Dual Xeon E5-2680 V2
RAM: 265GB DDR3 ECC Rdimm
Ans storage of course.

My Base system is Proxmox VE and on top of that Freenas for the Nas stuff.
Everything is working fine but the system only uses 1GB of ram, which I guess is impossible.
I have a 120GB of SSD cache added and I have set the tunable:

Code:

vfs.zfs.arc_max

set to 1073741824 so it may use 16GB of RAM for ARC.
But even If I'm transferring data, freenas still won't use more than 1GB of RAM.

Why is that?
How to fix it?

Thanks!

Cheers!

 

[HoneyBadger]

vfs.zfs.arc_max set to 1073741824 so it may use 16GB of RAM for ARC.

1073741824 bytes = 1048576 KB = 1024 MB = 1GB

Good news, this tunable is doing exactly what you asked it to.

I would check your ProxMox/KVM configuration and ensure that you've assigned sufficient RAM to the unit; based on your first screenshot it looks almost as if the entire VM only has 1GB.

 

[unf0rg0tt3n]

1073741824 bytes = 1048576 KB = 1024 MB = 1GB

Good news, this tunable is doing exactly what you asked it to.

I would check your ProxMox/KVM configuration and ensure that you've assigned sufficient RAM to the unit; based on your first screenshot it looks almost as if the entire VM only has 1GB.

Freenas keeps forcing it back to 1GB

 

[HoneyBadger]

What does dmesg | grep memory from inside the FreeNAS VM give you?

 

[unf0rg0tt3n]

What does dmesg | grep memory from inside the FreeNAS VM give you?

 

[HoneyBadger]

Looks like you've got memory hotplug enabled; I believe FreeBSD still doesn't support that. Disable that for the FreeNAS VM - if you can't do it specifically there, you might have to do it globally for all of Proxmox.

 

[unf0rg0tt3n]

Looks like you've got memory hotplug enabled; I believe FreeBSD still doesn't support that. Disable that for the FreeNAS VM - if you can't do it specifically there, you might have to do it globally for all of Proxmox.

You are a hero! it worked :D

 

[HoneyBadger]

No problem.

With that sorted ... can we talk for a moment about how the drives are presented to your FreeNAS VM? Is the entire physical HBA/storage adapter passed through, are they set up as entire raw disks, or QCOW/RAW images? (Those options are listed in a best-to-worst preference.)

Also, what is the storage at the base ProxMox level? LVM/mdraid, ZFS inside of ProxMox, or a hardware RAID card?

 

[unf0rg0tt3n]

No problem.

With that sorted ... can we talk for a moment about how the drives are presented to your FreeNAS VM? Is the entire physical HBA/storage adapter passed through, are they set up as entire raw disks, or QCOW/RAW images? (Those options are listed in a best-to-worst preference.)

Also, what is the storage at the base ProxMox level? LVM/mdraid, ZFS inside of ProxMox, or a hardware RAID card?

The bootdrives are set up as mirror across two different drives.

The storage drives are: 4*1TB 2.5 inch hdd in a hotswap bay.
I pass the whole drive to freenas vm and let freenas handle the raddz-1.

My supermicro board has raid by intel chipset, which I haven't set up.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Whole drive under KVM should be okay, but I would confirm that you get valid SMART data and that sync/cache flush behavior works as expected (setting a dataset to sync=always should trash your random I/O performance)

 

[unf0rg0tt3n]

Whole drive under KVM should be okay, but I would confirm that you get valid SMART data and that sync/cache flush behavior works as expected (setting a dataset to sync=always should trash your random I/O performance)

I got a serial number at disk info.
Also got no logged errors on smartctl. so I guess it works.

How to check to know for sure?