I’ve recently been looking at options to upgrade (completely replace) my current NAS, as it’s currently more than a little bit jank and frankly kinda garbage. I have a few questions about that and about migrating my current TrueNAS scale installation or at least it’s settings over.
Q1: Does the physical order of the drives matter? I.E. The order they are plugged into the SATA ports.
Q2: Since I have TrueNAS scale installed on a USB flash drive (yeah, ik you’re not supposed to but it is what it is), how bad of an idea would it be to just… unplug it from my current NAS and plug it into the new one?
Q3: If all else fails, how reliable is TrueNAS scale’s importing of ZFS Pools and are there any gotchas with it?
Q4: Would moving to a virtualized solution like proxmox and installing TrueNAS scale on top of that in a VM make more sense on a beefier server?
E: Thank you all for the replies, the migration went smoothly :)
I can answer Q1. The order definitely does not matter. All the drives are aware of who they are, so when you import, as long as they are all present, you’re good.
Q1: No it shouldn’t matter as long as you didn’t import the pool using device names (sda, sdb, etc…). If you’re using labels or UUIDs (the better option for portability sake). If they do happen to use device names, just export the pool and then reimport it on the same system using labels or UUIDs.
Q2: It should work just fine assuming you’re not using device names for your pools
Q3: it’s just as robust as FreeBSD’s implementation. Once again, see the answer to Q1.
Q4: IMO virtualizing your NAS just adds more headaches and performance overhead compared to running it on bare metal.
Out of my years running TrueNAS on and off, I’ve always had issues with it when doing anything other than using it purely as a storage box. I tried 24.04 a few weeks ago, thinking that most of the issues I had originally when SCALE was launched would be resolved. They weren’t. So I went back to Arch w/OpenZFS…again
I’ve been running TrueNAS scale for a while and my only issue with it has been having to create a virtual bridge so that my VMs can ping the host and vice versa, been a pretty smooth experience other than that. As for the performance overhead… my replacement server is VERY beefy, compared to my old one so I couldn’t care less lol.
I agree, the VM management could be easier. I don’t understand why I can’t have two NICs in the same subnet as long as they have different IPs.
The bigger annoyance for me was there was no way to tell what disk is attached where in the VM device listings since it only shows the boot order and not labels or paths.
Yeah, but I should be able to have them separate as well like I can in every other Linux distro. In TrueNAS they force you to have them in separate subnets for some reason.
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Don’t forget to ‘export’ the zpool before moving the disks. Afterwards, you ‘import’ it on the new system. That’s all it needs.
If you use proxmox, then Truenas is kinda redundant, since proxmox can manage your zpool as well.
I can answer Q1. The order definitely does not matter. All the drives are aware of who they are, so when you import, as long as they are all present, you’re good.
Q1: No it shouldn’t matter as long as you didn’t import the pool using device names (sda, sdb, etc…). If you’re using labels or UUIDs (the better option for portability sake). If they do happen to use device names, just export the pool and then reimport it on the same system using labels or UUIDs.
Q2: It should work just fine assuming you’re not using device names for your pools
Q3: it’s just as robust as FreeBSD’s implementation. Once again, see the answer to Q1.
Q4: IMO virtualizing your NAS just adds more headaches and performance overhead compared to running it on bare metal.
Out of my years running TrueNAS on and off, I’ve always had issues with it when doing anything other than using it purely as a storage box. I tried 24.04 a few weeks ago, thinking that most of the issues I had originally when SCALE was launched would be resolved. They weren’t. So I went back to Arch w/OpenZFS…again
I’ve been running TrueNAS scale for a while and my only issue with it has been having to create a virtual bridge so that my VMs can ping the host and vice versa, been a pretty smooth experience other than that. As for the performance overhead… my replacement server is VERY beefy, compared to my old one so I couldn’t care less lol.
I agree, the VM management could be easier. I don’t understand why I can’t have two NICs in the same subnet as long as they have different IPs.
The bigger annoyance for me was there was no way to tell what disk is attached where in the VM device listings since it only shows the boot order and not labels or paths.
Can’t you just bridge the 2 NICs?
Yeah, but I should be able to have them separate as well like I can in every other Linux distro. In TrueNAS they force you to have them in separate subnets for some reason.