Introduction to TrueNAS Scale (BETA) - Part 1

hi i'm dj ware on this episode of the cyber gizmo i'm going to be looking at trueness scale yeah it's the beta version right after this [Music] this came out in august obviously i mean it we're going to look it's an early look at at truenass scale and of course this is the 2108 beta version which yeah august it's the 21 year 08 month so what is it so it's built on true nas core i mean it's not part of freebsd or anything like that but they took the code base from true nascor and migrated it to linux they've added linux containers to this they've added kbm to it and they provide something they call scale out zfs which of course there is no such thing zfs scale out is provided by cluster clusters actually mounting zfs file systems so yeah a little bit of a difference but they can market it any way they want but there is no such thing as scale out cfs uh so that helps them with their acronym the s and scale to scale out cbs c is converged hype it's active active uh and as far as being able to do failover and that type of thing and then it supports linux containers then it's easy to manage um some of the features in this kind of fall into four generat general categories there's the management layer to the left which has your web ui your virtual private networks and then underneath that you have like your cluster management and proactive support then your storage area is above that which has object storage pools block storage pools and file storage pools we'll talk more about some of the in-depth things that are here there's also a number of apps you can install with trunas of course that's nothing new that's that's been around since the trunas core and also the uh freenas versions of the software as well so yeah you can install plaques and iconics nexcloud and jenkins there's also docker and kubernetes that are underneath that as well that you can also install the kbm support allows virtual machines for windows and linux and also freebsd which isn't listed here which is kind of weird but i guess that's okay the roadmap are yeah we talked about the release numbers 2108 was august 2010 the 2021-10 will be heading into the first release candidate for true nass scale and of course that'll be in sometime in october through that scale at this point is really meant for use by developers testers if you're a technology technology enthusiast or if you're an early adopter you might find this home but if you're a business user go back to trueness core because your system may not be stable enough to support an enterprise environment however the 2108 is a feature complete release that is it hasn't been fully tested but all of the features that they want in this particular version are present it does include a clustered smb and we'll talk more about that but there's also a much improved windows acl editor so it allows you to your access control list allows you to uh match those up more completely with the way windows does it there's also improved systems in sharing dashboards so that you can get a handle on what's going on with the machine what's going on with the shares and also the storage pools underneath there is enclosure management and there this is also based on open cfs 2.1 you'll probably find some older documentation that's out on their site that it was written back in september of 2020 that references uh release candidate version of opencfs 2.0 but that to open zfs is no longer in release candidate status it's officially released has been since december of last year and they're currently working on 2.2 right now the can the container storage interface with csi there's also an applications catalog in improvement uh so you have some you have the ability to install the default apps that come with the system and you can also install custom ones there is a improved web ui and we'll look at that as well so one of the things you'll first come up to is see the dashboard and this is not unlike previous versions of true nascor um but you'll probably find some linux things that are on here now that uh you know like your kvm support as well so yeah you have your system information you can pick and choose what you want on this dashboard so yeah so if you want more information about different areas of the system you can it's in the config box up there on the right hand side you can just pick that and then check off with some of the things that you want to look at in addition to what is default and then your menu item list is on the left hand side and across the top there is there is something called true command now which true command is a cloud service and i think it's it is a commercial server but it allows you to manage your trunas machines across all of the clusters so if you when you are in a eventually in an enterprise environment with excuse me with this you will be able to see the status and activity that's going on across all of your machines if you wish to pay for that you can you can start out with a single node of course and then you can scale out to over a hundred storage nodes and each of those storage nodes can have many compute nodes so and those compute nodes can be in virtual machine form or in docker container form there the type of shares that are offered with this is a server message block or smb of course that most people refer to that as windows shares the network file system or nfs shares which would be more linux-like or unix-like the internet small computer systems interface iscsi which is normally used as object stores and that would then allow you to store the vms themselves for example in that object store uh web distributed authoring and version versioning or webdav gluster i have is a question mark because there's mentions of it as being available but it's not i mean it's not part of the web ui currently but i'm going to test and see if i can actually hook up to their gluster server so i'm curious as if i can actually see their gluster clusters or not so yeah it'd be interesting to see that so we'll play around with that today that's why i have a question mark there as to whether or not i can mount their their shares directly as far as directory services are concerned you have a number of choices you can use and that is of course active directory ldap will work as well there's also idmap which is how you would map a windows directory service over to some some other form of directory service whether that be ldap or whether that be even just a normal sc password kerberos you also have available to you and of course that allows you to pass keys back and forth to authenticate and authorize users to use certain applications on the machine so yes and it does support the windows version of kerberos virtualization this is this is new it did not have this available on truenas core it allows you to set up virtual machines on the truenas host so you can this will run alongside a truenas and you can bring up guest os's which can be windows they can be linux and they can also be freebsd i didn't see any mention of hosting maco mac os those are your three ones that you can have now you'll see some of the documentation just mentioned windows and linux but if you go actually to the dashboard freebsd is an option as well uh yeah from there you can then pick what virtual cpus and virtual memory you want to allocate from the host over to that now remember don't allocate so much that you leave your zfs file caches hanging yes or your performance may suffer so yeah you know use a little common sense um you can also pass your discs or z vaults they they will be created as evolves on top of the zfs pool so yeah if you're worried about oh it's just going to be a file oh no that's performance it's going to be horrible now it actually creates a z-ball to do that network interfaces you can of course pass virtualized uh interfaces or and share your bandwidth with the main network again use some common sense in how you configure machines because you don't want uh to interfere with the performance of your file shares going out over a single network card you probably would want to dedicate an additional nic to do uh your network interface for your virtualization in order to maintain a good performance uh the installation media you know yeah i don't like to mix loads on on necks i mean that's just not a good idea especially how cheap they are i mean it's not like they're very expensive so install media can for your virtual machines your isos they can be on the local media installed under a data set if you wish or you can upload them from your workstation at the time you're constructing the virtual machine so either way you want to do that is fine gpus now they don't i do talk about pass-through of the gpu to the virtual machine but not directly so yeah it's a little sketchy here on on how you select a gpu to be assigned to a vm but i'm assuming it's a similar method to other ways of passing through a a gpu to the virtual machine so you would either need a graphics card which can host multiple virtual copies of a gpu that you can then divvy out to the different virtual machines or if you're using a gaming gpu of course you would only be able to pass that once to abm and nothing else apps official applications are plex next cloud mineo custom applications that you can pick and those can be docker images if you wish there's a number of reporting uh elements within the system too that you can drill into that will show you graphically how what your machine is doing person what the percent uh activity on your cpu and your threads are also the amount of io that's being read and written to the disc you can look at how much memory is in use and on the main on the main dashboard it'll actually break it up into the the different categories of memory available your cfs disk cache and then what's in use by the system and then you have your network interfaces you can look at those and see how much uh how much traffic they're carrying as an aggregate and then nfs you can look at your nfs shares you can also look at what your partitions are doing what your systems are doing also your targets your iscsi targets and your zfs pools what kind of traffic they're carrying as well so i i don't think they're done with this but that's fairly comprehensive for a start i mean that would definitely be enough information to be able to manage a system on a day-to-day basis i would think you'd probably and there is an alert system that you can turn on for notification of different problems of the system as well uh in the system settings you have a number of categories for like updating the the software on the system that would include the operating system as well as the true nas software stack and and the applications that are supported by them there's general settings that allow you to set up the you know the host name and all that advanced settings drill down into other features of the system and then there's boot boot settings and services settings this will let you pick and choose what services you want running you can monitor them to see if they're up or down and then you also have a shell access if you wish as far as hard work requirements are concerned now these are minimum so don't take this as being recommend recommendations they are not you'd have to do your own dual diligence as to how big your file systems are going to be and how many users you have what types of file sharing you're doing if you're going to do virtual machines how many what type and what are their particular load characteristics on the box i mean that that you can't apply a rule of thumb to that's just you got to engineer it to whatever size you need two core intel or amd x8664 so they do require 64-bit architecture machines uh memory 16 gibby bytes and so you will need at least that much in order to bring up the system now i am running mine under eight so yeah i'm a little bit under it does seem to run okay but i wouldn't rec it isn't recommended so a boot device at least 16 gigabyte of ssd storage they do not recommend using rotational drives for that storage is two identically sized devices or a single for a or a single storage pool uh to be used in the system so yeah and again those are minimums high speed interconnects that it supports now these are the ones that they're recommending and ix systems does not recommend doing direct detached copper so if you if you have dac interfaces in your systems for 10 gig uh ethernet connections you may want to reconsider they recommend optical fiber they don't recommend using deck so uh and that don't blame me that's them that's their recommendation so so as far if you want to virtualize truenas scale itself if you want to put it on a virtual machine these are some of the things that you will want to look at you'll want to pass your hardware disks to the the vm that you're going to be hosting on or pass the entire storage controller over to trunas also you'll want to disable any automatic scrubbing of pools because if you have a repair in progress you don't want to be scrubbing that disc at the same time so yeah bad things can happen use a minimum of three v dubs of course to uh to pass to the system to be used for your pools provide eight gig or more boot devices so that's the size and of course adequate ram to support your storage pools as well as any virtual machines and other system and the system overhead as well to be calculated into that uh they also recommend of course considering jumbo frames i've talked about that before on my channel i mean jumbo frames have their pluses in minus you might find they work you might find they don't work in all applications but in this instance they do recommend you might consider them so and there's some more things you might want to look at those are kind of the major ones you might want to look at the documentation for the rest of them that's all i had for today um true net scale looks interesting of course it is a beta and it's really early to tell whether or not how well it's going to perform actually in a production environment and actually see how well it actually does and then the ideal system would be to set this up with nvme drives and then push it and see how well it performs that's all i had for today and of course as you know with the chip shortages and and the pandemic going on we've got an issue with with uh with some of the manufacturers substituting uh inferior components on the different nvme boards i suspect they're probably also doing it on the ssds as well the sata ssds that is so um i know that intel does not but intel uses qlc memory anyway so on all their devices so they don't advertise doing tlc the issue has been that the tlc memory is being substituted for qlc and then the controllers are being substituted for ones that are um i wouldn't neces i would say they were of lesser quality not necessarily a lesser performance but of lesser quality so you may have some lifetime issues however as long as as long as the manufacturers stick to their warranty and they support them for as long as their warranty says i don't have a problem with that just make sure your data's backed up and you're watching them closely as they start to age because qlcs will wear out faster than tlcs do so they don't have quite the lifespan anyway and that's all i'll cover for today i hope you enjoyed this and to all my patreons thank you so much for your support i really do appreciate it and thanks and goodbye hope to see you next time [Music] [Music] you

Channel: DJ Ware

Views: 1,287

Keywords: DJ Ware, CyberGizmo, Linux, IXSystems, TrueNAS, TrueNAS Scale, Debian 11

Id: tGhu8JXUnKk

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021