Using compression and deduplication may also reduce the writes to your SSD vdevs, prolonging the lifetime and reducing the cost of maintaining the solution. ZFS ZIL and SLOG Nice project and I’m jealous of your home lab. Makes mine seem a bit lame. Nevertheless, I am a storage geek too. I followed this post with interest. Having a FreeNAS box myself running a ZFS filesystem on an i5 CPU, 16GB DDR3 ram, and 12TB of WD Reds with 2 120GB SSD’s on board your section on ZIL and SLOG in the Optimization piece peeked my interest. Not sure I will find the time to dive into that but it is of definite interest. I restarted the X.org service (required when changing the options above), and proceeded to add a vGPU to a virtual machine I already had configured and was using for VDI. You do this by adding a “Shared PCI Device”, selecting “NVIDIA GRID vGPU”, and I chose to use the highest profile available on the K1 card called “grid_k180q”. VM Settings to add NVIDIA GRID vGPU Use the rsync command to transfer the SD card Linux install boot partition to the new boot SD card. Later on in this guide, you’ll be copying the boot partition from the SD Card Linux image, on to this newly created boot SD Card for the NFS Root. Prep the Linux install for NFS Root

More and more businesses are using all-flash NVMe and SSD based storage systems, so I figured there’s no reason why I can’t have build and have my own budget custom all NVMe flash NAS. To install, I copied over the vib file “NVIDIA-vGPU-kepler-VMware_ESXi_6.5_Host_Driver_367.130-1OEM.650.0.0.4598673.vib” to a datastore, enabled SSH, and then ran the following command to install: esxcli software vib install -v /path/to/file/NVIDIA-vGPU-kepler-VMware_ESXi_6.5_Host_Driver_367.130-1OEM.650.0.0.4598673.vib Well, it’s not actually that new! NFS v4.1 was released in January 2010 and aimed to support clustered environments (such as virtualized environments, vSphere, ESXi). It includes a feature called Session trunking mechanism, which is also known as NFS Multipathing.

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Technically faster speeds should possible using iSCSI instead of NFS, however special care must be made when using iSCSI.

Mount the boot partition of the SD Card Linux install to a directory. In my case I used directory called “old”. If you simply shutdown the FreeNAS instance that’s hosting the iSCSI datastore, this will result in a improper unclean unmount of the VMFS volume and could lead to data loss, even if no VMs are running. If you haven’t already configured an NFS export on the NAS, do so now. No further special configuration for v4.1 is required other than the norm. I’m looking forward to doing some tests with this VM while continuing to use vGPU. I will also be doing some testing utilizing 3D Accelerated vSGA. The IO-PCE585-5I card is strictly an HBA (a Host Bus Adapter). This card provides JBOD access to the disks so that each can be independently accessed by the computer or servers operating system.

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With “nvidia-smi” you can see the 4 GPUs, power usage, temperatures, memory usage, GPU utilization, and processes. This is the main GPU manager for the card. There are some other flags you can use for relevant information. “nvidia-smi vgpu” for vGPU Information “nvidia-smi vgpu -q” to Query more vGPU Information Final Thoughts Clearly iSCSI is the best performing method for ESXi host connectivity to a TrueNAS based NVMe Storage Server. This works perfect because we’ll get the VAAI features (like being able to reclaim space). iSCSI MPIO Speed Test im afraid-a week or 2 later for a followup with proper equipment would have redeemed this sillyness The card works perfectly with VMware ESXi PCI passthrough when passing it through to a virtualized VM.

Shame I cannot share Crystal Disk screenshots here. If I could I think you would be impressed. How does Seq. 1 GB Reads at Q8T1 of 11,975.45 and Writes of 28,786.09 sound?

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For iSCSI, you need to create a zVol and then configure the iSCSI Target settings and make it available. SMB (Windows File Shares) The type of write performed can be requested by the application or service that’s performing the write, or it can be explicitly set on the file system itself. In FreeNAS (in our example) you can override this by setting the “sync” option on the zpool, dataset, or zvol. The risk can be lowered by replicating the pool or dataset to slower storage on a frequent or regular basis. Slow and Secure

Some feature you may be giving up may actually help extend the life or endurance of your SSD such as compression and deduplication, as they reduce the number of writes performed on each of your vdevs (drives).After some thorough testing, the card proved to be stable and worked great! Additional Notes & Issues Once this is complete, your OS root is now copied to the NFS root. Copy and Modify the boot SD Card to use NFS Root In my case, my FreeNAS instance will be providing both NAS and SAN services to the network, thus has 2 virtual NICs. On my internal LAN where it’s acting as a NAS (NIC 1), it will be using the default MTU of 1500 byte frames to make sure it can communicate with workstations that are accessing the shares. On my SAN network (NIC 2) where it will be acting as a SAN, it will have a configured MTU of 9000 byte frames. All other devices (SANs, client NICs, and iSCSI initiators) on the SAN network have a matching MTU of 9000. Additional Notes