Installing SCALE - Best Practices? I don't see these in the install doc - comments?

[theprez]

Morning All -

I'm exploring moving away from TrueNAS CORE which has served me quite well and ran on eSXI 6 for years. From my understanding, TrueNAS Scale will allow me to part ways with VMWare ESXi and allow me to simply install Scale on bare metal and how VMs within.

For hardware, this would be running on a Dell PowerEdge T620, with 2 Intel Xeon E5s @ 3.20GHz and 128 GB of ECC Ram with 8 (4TB) hard drives on a dedicated SAS controller.

My questions are three fold:

1) Given my experience with ESXi, I know that when I installed TrueNAS Core back in the day it was installed on a hard drive (VMWare's Data Storage) and had a 500GB partition. My question here is, what is the best practice for a Scale install? I've read others mention they installed it to a USB stick - is that right? Would 32GB suffice?

2) I would suspect that TrueNAS Scale on bare metal would work best vs. having a hypervisor type OS installed on a hypervisor such as VMWare - is that logical or no? I'm quite used to VMWare and willing to learn to part ways with it if it has advantages.

3) Assuming SSDs or USBs are the way to go, would it be beneficial to have the boot disk configured in a RAID 1 for redundancy on the OS and configs?

Thanks

https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/gettingstarted/installingscale/

The above guide didn't help answer #1.

Thanks

 

[jgreco]

Well, you could have been running VM's on Core too. Core has had the bhyve hypervisor module for several years now. I suspect that the KVM stuff on Scale is somewhat better, but both are serviceable.

USB sticks are not recommended, as they tend to lack the endurance to run the OS off of. A SATA or USB-attached SSD is the way to go, SATA being preferable.

dedicated SAS controller.

If that's an IT mode HBA, then great. If it's a RAID controller, please refer to

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com