My TrueNAS Setup - How I Configure TrueNAS in my Home Server (Pools, iSCSI, Nextcloud)

oh lazy sunday what color you guys like based on my last couple of streams uh turns out a lot of you are a fan of orange so let's trunas you've clicked on this video because either a you're interested in true nas and you want to learn more about it or b you just want to be more like me in which case i'm extremely flattered but i think it's going to be the former so what i'm going to do in this video is go over my trueness setup and the one i actually use in my home lab so this isn't really a tutorial it's not really a hey i found this cool software let me show you how to do everything magical in it this is how i use it so what i'm basically going to be going over today is trueness core versus trueness scale what's the difference and why i use trueness core virtualizing truenass versus running it on bare metal and why i have it virtualized i'll be going over the different pools i have set up in truenass how i have everything shared whether that's through samba or through iscsi then going over jails and more specifically the only one i run being next cloud so if any of that interests you or you just want to hear me talk then stay tuned [Music] okay first things first when you're browsing around on the internet and you come across true nas you'll likely see that there's two different versions there's trueness core and true mass scale trueness core being the one that i use trueness core is essentially what most people refer to when they just say true mass it's the original version of truenass based off freenas and built upon freebsd and trinas scale is relatively new it's still in beta and the difference being that it's built on top of linux so it's more designed to be kind of a hypervisor as well as a nas solution whereas truenet's core is essentially built around being a solid mass solution with a couple of hypervisor features i personally only care about the mass solution because i'm running proxmox as my hypervisor so i went with trueness core and scale wasn't even out when i set everything up all right so virtualized versus bare metal which is the best for you and why did i go with virtualized so like i just said before trueness core is designed to be a nas solution first with some hypervisor features kind of sprinkled in there i don't know what this was now when i first set up my server the plan was to have a dedicated hypervisor and use it as a nas as well and the hypervisor i went with was proxmox now proxmox doesn't have really good nas features built in at all so i really wanted a solid nas setup and that's what led me to truenas now i didn't want to build an entire other system just to run truenas so virtualizing it made sense and the reason virtualizing it made sense is that i pass through all the drives directly to trueness whether that's through a sata controller or through hba cards passing through your drives directly to a true nas virtual machine is going to give you your best performance now if you don't care about running a bunch of vms and hypervisor stuff and you just want a dedicated nas that performs well then yeah install trunas on bare metal it's not like it's a terrible hypervisor it's just not the best speaking of it being a solid nas solution it's also running zfs so this isn't going to be a video going over all the different file system types so i'm not going to go into depth of what zfs is but essentially it's an extremely efficient and fast storage protocol that is also very ram heavy so the general rule of thumb is if you're going to be using true nas as your nas solution try to allocate at least one gigabyte of ram per one terabyte of storage now my solution i have three separate pools uh one being my main one which is four 12 terabyte hard drives in essentially what you would call a raid 10 configuration then i have a plex pool that is two six terabyte drives that are mirrored and then i have a solid state pool which is two two terabyte solid state drives that are mirrored okay so now let's dive into my setup and we can kind of go over how i have everything configured so here it is here's my true noise dashboard you can see nothing's really going on here but what i've done is i've allocated 16 threads as well as 64 gigabytes of ram directly to truenas and as we scroll down you'll see the three pulls that i just mentioned uh we'll talk about those in a bit as well as i do have 10 gigabit hooked up to it to give me as much bandwidth as reasonably possible so let's go ahead and take a look at my pools the first one being my main one this is like i said four 12 terabyte drives and i do have some caching on there as well so if we dive in you'll see from the top level i have the two mirrors set up uh all these are 12 terabyte drives i have two separate mirrors and then those mirrors are striped together so i'm getting the redundancy of mirrors but also the speed of striping now if we go down i have some logs and caching drives set up some solid state draws one for logging one for caching and then a special drive which is essentially taking kind of that little metadata those little reason writes that that happen during a zfs transaction and writing them to their own separate mirrored kind of pool which helps speed up all transactions in zfs so that you don't have to write all those little uh bits to your main devices so if we go back we'll take a look at the other two they're much more simply configured for example this is my plex one we'll go in here and it's just two mirrored six terabyte drives and no caching because i mean plex all it's doing is essentially reading from their um large files large singular files so i don't have any caching on there and then obviously going into an ssd pool you're not really going to cache anything and if you look at it you can see i'm not using much of the space which is a good thing because that means i won't have to be upgrading hopefully anytime soon so those are how my drives are set up let's talk about how i share those two devices within my network so the first thing you want to do is set up different users so that you can have different permissions assigned to different users within your network and that's pretty easy to do you'll just go into accounts go to users you can see the root one by default i have a personal one set up for myself and then i have another one set up for different services on the network you can also make groups i've made a smb group which basically says i can assign this group to whatever samba shares that i want meaning that whoever is assigned to that group whatever users are in that group get access to whatever samba shares i want to throw on the network so settings for it aren't complicated at all adding a user you basically can just enter their name username password uh it assigns a user id to them you can then set user ownership through here um or you can just wait and set network permission shares later and groups also it's pretty straightforward you create a group and then you can assign it members you can say i pretty much have everybody in here because every samba share i create i want everyone to have access to so now we want to actually share devices across the network to do that you'll go down into sharing and for the most part i recommend doing a windows share or a samba share it's not that it's only going to be available on windows machines samba can be used across linux mac and windows so creating a windows share or a samba share will give you access to it no matter what device you're on i'll also be showing you how to set up an iscsi share but we'll get to that in a moment so go into your windows shares you can see i have a few set up here they're all relatively the same so i'll go into one to show you how it's configured when you set one up you'll give it a name you'll give it a path so this is going to be essentially what pools you have and you can see my three pools that we went over before are displayed here then you can kind of drill down into those and make folders or file systems for these shares so you can see for example on this one i'm using my my big four 12 terabyte drives pool and in there i have just created a network hdd network share folder so once that's created it'll ask you to create the shares or give it permissions the way i do it is edit the file system acl so when you go into there you can now specify over here who has the rights and what rights you want to give them now by default the owner and remember when we're setting up users you can specify the owner obviously has access to everything you don't have to have it like that but i don't see why you wouldn't and then you can also add an acl item and you can see here i've specified that i want to give a group access to it so i specified who i specified a group and then what group remember that smb group i created i can do that here or you can say user if you'd like and there's all these like default users it's kind of annoying so scroll down to the bottom and you'll see the users you've created let's stay with what i had before and you can specify uh the acl type being allow permissions type basic like a pumpkin spice latte permissions full control this is where you'd specify you know obviously what access you want read modify full control whatever and then you're pretty much good hit save and you will be able to have access to it and then when you go into pools you should see it show up here here's my network hdd you can also edit permissions from here if you'd like yeah it's essentially set up to go and you can see here in windows i haven't mapped already and here we are you can see you can navigate to it by going to your ip address slash the name of it and the name we gave it was network hdd and just like that i am in here but what about iscsi is a whole different other animal so with the samba shear basically everybody in the house can access it i say house i mean network iscsi is a different protocol and basically when you create an iscsi device or iscsi's share it's only going to be accessed by one machine and that one machine is essentially going to see it as a physically attached device rather than a network attached disk so why would you want this i know a huge reason is obviously for security like a small office environment and another one being that a lot of people want to host their steam library from a nas and steam doesn't play well with network shares but it does play well with iscsi because iscsi essentially sees it as a physically attached device so let's walk through how to create and set up an iscsi share so just like samba you're going to go down into sharing you're going to click on iscsi or block shares and the first thing you'll see is this target global configuration you can just leave that as default but before we actually create the share we have to allocate some space for the drive now to do that let's go into storage we'll go down into pools and you can see i already have one set up you may have seen that earlier when i was showing you my network hdd file system you can see right above it i have this main desktop volume and for the comments it's my main desktop iscsi device that i use on my main desktop over there now let's create another one that i will attach to a streaming pc that i'm using right now so first thing you want to do is select which pool you want this to access you could pick from any pool you have i'm just going to keep it simple in the same one so what you're going to do is go over here and click the three dots and then click add z-vol it's very important that you select z-vol and not data set data set is more for a file system and network shares whereas z-vol is more like block storage designed specifically for iscsi so we'll go ahead and click add z-vol give it a name we'll call this one stream disk here's where you can specify a size the other one was 500 gigabytes i'll give this one 500 gigabytes i'm not going to play favorites over here sync standard compression level you can read into these if you want i just go with the standard lz4 so zfs deduplication there's a lot that goes into it and can honestly be its own video but for time purposes here i will very briefly skim through it deduplication is basically a way to save storage by eliminating duplicated files across the drives that you have deduplication turned on for so we're going to turn that on read-only inherit off that's fine whatever if you want encryption go ahead and hit submit no so now you can see we have two volumes now our main desktop and our stream disk we are ready to create our iscsi share back to sharing back to iscsi block shares now we can enter the wizard thank you so it's really easy to use the first thing you're going to do is give it a name i will call this one stream i remember it's probably the same thing stream disk let's make it easy i think that's what called it here you'll select device because we created a z-vol and when we go down to this drop-down for device you will see that we can either use our main desktop although it's already in use we will select our stream disk and then down here i don't honestly know the difference between a lot of these so i go with modern os it's worked for me i'm sure it's fine next is portal so if you haven't created one you're gonna have to create one here i've already created one all that's doing is specifying a portal to connect to which is basically your trueness machine so you can see here it's just going to be listed on our true nas ip on the port 3260. go to next initiator you want to give this a name you can keep it as the same name to keep it consistent i already realized a mistake i made you'll see that when we try to finish it here but let's name this stream disk hit next and submit and just like that like i said for the name you can only use lowercase uh alphanumeric characters stream disk submit okay and just like that it is created the only thing you're gonna have to check is going down into services and make sure that your iscsi service is running and you're probably going to want to set that to start automatically when trueness boots so yeah we're running we're ready to set it up on this machine and if you're using windows it has a built-in iscsi application so that's the thing with iscsi you have to be running an application to connect to the target and windows has one built in it's called iscsi initiator so what you're going to do is open that and it's not too complicated it's actually pretty easy to get this set up so the first thing you're going to do is go over to configuration and change the initiator name now remember we created our own initiator name just a few moments ago and we made that stream disk click ok then you're going to go back to discovery and discover portal and remember when we created the portal it was simply port 3260 on the ip address of your true nas machine in my case that's 10.0.0.33 click ok next go over to targets if you did this correctly you will see your target show up if you didn't do it correctly it won't be here so go back and make sure that everything is set up correctly if you don't see this here so all you do is click on that click connect if you set up authorization when you did your iscsi wizard then you would have to enter a username and password but i didn't and just like that we're connected so now if i go down here to initiate the disk and go down to create and format uh hard disk partitions when i open that and i see something popped up and said you must initialize this disk so let's go ahead and do it and just like that we now have 500 gigabytes of unallocated data ready to use as if we just plugged in a 500 gigabyte hard drive directly to the system and you can go in and format it uh scuzzy next finish and just like that it looks like we have a physical device connected directly to our system but it's being shared across the network from our nas so there you go iscsi device set up on multiple machines with deduplication on ready to host your steam library without taking up too much space now let's take a step back and talk about something i mentioned before being that trueness core i don't think is really that great of a hypervisor that being mainly because it's built off of freebsd and most solid hypervisors like unraid or proxmox or what have you are built off of linux and that's the main reason why truenas decided to release an entire new product called truenasscale which is built on linux so you can see here we have things in here like virtual machines and plugins but it's not as robust and not nearly as feature-rich as something like proxmox or unraid so you can see i am running a plug-in that being next cloud and if you want to do that in here that's perfectly fine i'm not saying if you're running this as your hypervisor then it's going to be absolutely shitty but i just find that proxmox or unraid would be a better solution but you do you so when you want to add a plugin or an app whatever you want to call it you're going to have to specify where you want these apps to be stored on which pool and that being your jail is what they call it for freebsd apps so mine are all running on my main pool you can select whichever one you want um and then if you want to install something you can either choose from the few that are officially supported by uh truenas and ix systems or you can select the community apps so you can scroll through here and whoever designed that this should just be one long horizontal scroll is basically satan but yeah i mean you can see pretty popular applications here there's sonar radar uh a lot of things openvpn something to do with minecraft uh home assistant grafana so there's no shortage of things in here assuming you want some of the most popular apps but it's just not as intuitive or easy to use as a linux based system with docker if you want to take a look at it once it's complete and finished you can look at all the settings here i hate when it does this you can see the status of it it's up and running it gives you a portal to your gui super easy to get to if you want to go in and customize some settings you can do that almost like a docker container but not quite so and navigating to it is just like any other next cloud installation whether that's in true nasa on a jail whether that's in docker whether that's directly onto a linux vm doesn't matter after everything's installed it's all relatively the same so yeah that's the gist of how i use trunas and i am a very big ambassador of using truenass as your nas solution overall if you're looking to build out your own nas i highly recommend going with trunas whether you choose core or scale that's entirely up to you but that's it i hope you learned something today i hope you enjoyed it i'm curious to know if you're using truenass or if you're using something different like openmediavault let me know down in the comments what you're running and if you're running it on bare metal or if it's virtualized but that's all i have for you today if you like this video drop a like if you like content like this please subscribe thank you so much for watching and i will see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 6,711

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Id: ghm_oEl_PRg

Length: 20min 42sec (1242 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021