Traemandir
Cadet
- Joined
- May 16, 2023
- Messages
- 6
Hi everyone,
Just wanted to post here and see if anyone can provide me some insight, as I'm getting to the end of my rope here trying to setup a new TrueNAS appliance ...
For a little background, I manage IT for a small K-12 School district with about ~300 staff members. All our production user data is stored on servers running Windows Server 2019, through Windows Folder Redirection. I decided to order a new TrueNAS appliance with the goal of migrating over user data, and being able to phase out multiple servers in favor of a more powerful and more redundant storage solution. But I'm having a lot of trouble migrating a subset of test users into the TrueNAS in a way that is compatible with our existing environment. From what I read online TrueNAS is supposed to support Windows home directories, but the details of whether my scenario is supported or not is very unclear. I've tried to approach this from two different angles, but neither one has yielded the results I was hoping for ....
Scenario A - Using TrueNAS as an iSCSI target for a Windows Server VM
My original plan was to use the TrueNAS as an iSCSI target for our Hyper-V server, and to use this setup for hosting a Windows file server, in addition to a few other small VMs. The issue I ran into in this scenario is that while I had no issue migrating test user data to the new virtual machine who's storage is hosted on the new Zvol, performance on the user end was very slow. I'm not sure if there are optimizations I can make on the Hyper-V side for better IO performance, or if this kind of setup will always perform slow?? I know the bottleneck lies within the virtual machine because transfer speeds to the TrueNAS directly was over 10x faster. I'll include full system specs at the bottom of this post. But for the specifics of this scenario:
1. Virtual machine was configured with a 2TB VHDX storage drive
2. VHDX file lives on a partition formatted as ReFS (I believe the partition was set to use a 64Kb block size?)
3. ReFS partition lives on the iSCSI device
4. iSCSI device connects to the Zvol over a 10GB fiber connection, through a dedicated switch (jumbo frames enabled)
------
Scenario B - Hosting user directories on TrueNAS directly via SMB
Due to the performance issues with the virtual machine, I figured it would probably be a better option to try hosting the home directories on a TrueNAS dataset directly using SMB. I was able to create a 3TiB dataset, create an SMB share with full control for Domain Admins. Then from my Windows laptop, I was able to access the share successfully, and created folders for our different Schools, and updated the security permissions on these sub folders through Windows to restrict access to only the IT department, and the Active Directory security group for that School's users.
Problem #1 - When attempting to copy user data to the new location, the transfer would hang for each user sub folder (My Documents, Downloads, ETC ...) that permission could not be updated in the destination directory - The file or folder could not be found (???). The workaround I found for this is that the transfer would continue if I went into the ACL settings for this dataset, and reapplied the ACL list recursively to the sub folders. But doing this for every sub folder is impractical. I set the owner to our Active Directory "Domain Admins" group, and gave this group full control as well. The method for the data migration is to use the robocopy cmdlet from the original windows server, with the syntax:
robocopy "source" "destination" /m /s /copyall
The syntax here is important because it copies all NTFS permissions, including file ownership. Copying all the existing permissions is critical for folder redirection mapping correctly when a user logs on to any of our PCs.
Problem #2 - I had a little better luck creating a separate dataset and SMB share with the "used as home directory" option checked. But in this scenario, when a user home directory is created, I cannot see the their folder myself, when navigating to the share from a Domain Admin account. This is an issue because in our current setup, whenever there's an issue we're able to view their home folder on the remote share, and "Take ownership" through Windows. Has anyone else gotten Folder Redirection to work using TrueNAS SMB as the destination?
------
So I guess my questions are the following:
1. Does anyone have Windows user data stored on TrueNAS using Folder Redirection?
2. Did you configure this using an iSCSI target for a Windows server, or using TrueNAS as the SMB target, or something else?
3. How did you migrate your user data?
I'll be happy to provide any additional information if you have any questions... I appreciate the help! Sorry this post didn't include much in the way of TrueNAS configuration or screenshots out of the gate, I just needed to get this post out before leaving for the day. System specs below:
TrueNAS appliance:
- Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4210R CPU
- 98 Gb Memory
- 6 high capacity HDD disks configured in raidz2, with a small SSD cache. Compression on the default value, ~ 30 TiB usable space
- 10Gb fiber networking
Thank you!
Just wanted to post here and see if anyone can provide me some insight, as I'm getting to the end of my rope here trying to setup a new TrueNAS appliance ...
For a little background, I manage IT for a small K-12 School district with about ~300 staff members. All our production user data is stored on servers running Windows Server 2019, through Windows Folder Redirection. I decided to order a new TrueNAS appliance with the goal of migrating over user data, and being able to phase out multiple servers in favor of a more powerful and more redundant storage solution. But I'm having a lot of trouble migrating a subset of test users into the TrueNAS in a way that is compatible with our existing environment. From what I read online TrueNAS is supposed to support Windows home directories, but the details of whether my scenario is supported or not is very unclear. I've tried to approach this from two different angles, but neither one has yielded the results I was hoping for ....
Scenario A - Using TrueNAS as an iSCSI target for a Windows Server VM
My original plan was to use the TrueNAS as an iSCSI target for our Hyper-V server, and to use this setup for hosting a Windows file server, in addition to a few other small VMs. The issue I ran into in this scenario is that while I had no issue migrating test user data to the new virtual machine who's storage is hosted on the new Zvol, performance on the user end was very slow. I'm not sure if there are optimizations I can make on the Hyper-V side for better IO performance, or if this kind of setup will always perform slow?? I know the bottleneck lies within the virtual machine because transfer speeds to the TrueNAS directly was over 10x faster. I'll include full system specs at the bottom of this post. But for the specifics of this scenario:
1. Virtual machine was configured with a 2TB VHDX storage drive
2. VHDX file lives on a partition formatted as ReFS (I believe the partition was set to use a 64Kb block size?)
3. ReFS partition lives on the iSCSI device
4. iSCSI device connects to the Zvol over a 10GB fiber connection, through a dedicated switch (jumbo frames enabled)
------
Scenario B - Hosting user directories on TrueNAS directly via SMB
Due to the performance issues with the virtual machine, I figured it would probably be a better option to try hosting the home directories on a TrueNAS dataset directly using SMB. I was able to create a 3TiB dataset, create an SMB share with full control for Domain Admins. Then from my Windows laptop, I was able to access the share successfully, and created folders for our different Schools, and updated the security permissions on these sub folders through Windows to restrict access to only the IT department, and the Active Directory security group for that School's users.
Problem #1 - When attempting to copy user data to the new location, the transfer would hang for each user sub folder (My Documents, Downloads, ETC ...) that permission could not be updated in the destination directory - The file or folder could not be found (???). The workaround I found for this is that the transfer would continue if I went into the ACL settings for this dataset, and reapplied the ACL list recursively to the sub folders. But doing this for every sub folder is impractical. I set the owner to our Active Directory "Domain Admins" group, and gave this group full control as well. The method for the data migration is to use the robocopy cmdlet from the original windows server, with the syntax:
robocopy "source" "destination" /m /s /copyall
The syntax here is important because it copies all NTFS permissions, including file ownership. Copying all the existing permissions is critical for folder redirection mapping correctly when a user logs on to any of our PCs.
Problem #2 - I had a little better luck creating a separate dataset and SMB share with the "used as home directory" option checked. But in this scenario, when a user home directory is created, I cannot see the their folder myself, when navigating to the share from a Domain Admin account. This is an issue because in our current setup, whenever there's an issue we're able to view their home folder on the remote share, and "Take ownership" through Windows. Has anyone else gotten Folder Redirection to work using TrueNAS SMB as the destination?
------
So I guess my questions are the following:
1. Does anyone have Windows user data stored on TrueNAS using Folder Redirection?
2. Did you configure this using an iSCSI target for a Windows server, or using TrueNAS as the SMB target, or something else?
3. How did you migrate your user data?
I'll be happy to provide any additional information if you have any questions... I appreciate the help! Sorry this post didn't include much in the way of TrueNAS configuration or screenshots out of the gate, I just needed to get this post out before leaving for the day. System specs below:
TrueNAS appliance:
- Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4210R CPU
- 98 Gb Memory
- 6 high capacity HDD disks configured in raidz2, with a small SSD cache. Compression on the default value, ~ 30 TiB usable space
- 10Gb fiber networking
Thank you!