Got a TrueNAS VM set up with HDDs mapped raw, it's working well but anything I should worry about?

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bilbo1337

Member
Sep 18, 2020
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First I initially wanted to pass through the whole HBA but then I couldn't boot TrueNAS if I did that. I ended up just passing each disk one at a time. The performance is great, the scrubs and smart tasks are working fine, but there are two little quirks that I've noticed. One quirk is that the HDDs are not hot-swappable anymore, I'd have to reboot the VM if I remove the drive, no big deal for my use case. The 2nd quirk is that when power goes out, I have to rescan the network interfaces for my iSCSi share to show up again, not sure what that's all about but it does end up working albeit I have to tinker with it manually.

Besides that, everything seems to work great but I'm not sure if I'm getting ahead of myself and if there's anything else I should look out for?
 

986box

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Oct 14, 2017
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I did that for a few years before getting a HBA. All drives shows up fine when plugged into the HBA and passthru without issues.
 

RTM

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2014
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It is my understanding that mapping drives (with the likes of RDM on ESXi) is not recommended for ZFS.
Here is a thread on the Truenas forum mentioning this: ESXi and RDM?

I know you mentioned that your Truenas wouldn't boot if the controller was passed through to it, this sounds fixable, after all truenas in a VM with a passthroughed controller is common configuration that many people use.
 
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986box

Active Member
Oct 14, 2017
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This is how I setup TruNas. HBA passthru but TruNas boot disk is served from vm disk and not off the HBA.
 
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bilbo1337

Member
Sep 18, 2020
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Florida
Hmm, seems my iSCSI issue was because I had to tinker with the target. I guess dynamically it couldn't catch it in time or something