Latest posts
-
TrueNAS Scale on a Dell R730xd — Part 8: 64K or 16K Recordsize for VMs over NFS?
In Part 7 a SLOG doubled random write speed on my VM datastore. One number from that test kept bugging me, though. fio in the VM wrote 72 MB/s, and zpool iostat showed the pool writing over 900 MB/s at the same time. That gap is the recordsize. My vmware dataset uses 64K records. When…
-
TrueNAS Scale on a Dell R730xd — Part 7: Does a SLOG Help VMs over NFS?
Update, October 2026: the VM datastore has since moved to a 16K recordsize dataset over NFS 3. The 64K results below are still valid as the before and after for the SLOG. See Part 8 for the recordsize test. In Part 6 I built a new pool on the R730xd: 22 used 10K SAS drives…
-
TrueNAS Scale on a Dell R730xd — Part 6: Replacing the R620 and Fixing DIF-Formatted SAS Drives
The R620 ran out of space. 24 used IBM SAS drives in an R730xd were the answer, once TrueNAS stopped rejecting them. How I stripped DIF/T10-PI with sg_format.
-
ESXi 8.0 U3 and TrueNAS NFS 4.1: The Thin Disk That Was 0 Bytes
A thin VMDK on a TrueNAS NFS 4.1 datastore showed 0 bytes on ESXi 8.0 U3 while the NAS had the full size, and the VM would not power on. How I found it, and why NFS 3 fixed it.
-
TrueNAS Scale on a Dell R620 — Part 5: Storage VLAN over DAC and a CA-Signed Certificate
Moving TrueNAS to a tagged storage VLAN over 10GbE DACs, the Test Changes rollback trap, getting locked out and back in, jumbo frames, DNS, and a certificate from the lab CA.
-
TrueNAS Scale on a Dell R620 — Part 4: Connecting VMware Hosts via NFS
Adding the R620 NFS datastore to the HPE DL380 G9 management host via vCenter using NFS 4.1, fixing write permissions with maproot settings on TrueNAS, and validating the connection.
-
TrueNAS Scale on a Dell R620 — Part 3: ZFS Tuning, Data Protection and Monitoring
Setting the ZFS ARC limit to 320GB, tuning dataset sync and record size for VMware NFS workloads, configuring daily snapshots, and setting up monitoring on TrueNAS Scale 25.10 on a Dell R620.
-
TrueNAS Scale on a Dell R620 — Part 2: Pool, NFS, and ZFS Tuning
Creating the ZFS RAIDZ2 pool, setting up a single NFS share for VMware, and tuning ZFS on TrueNAS Scale 25.10 running on a Dell R620 with 384GB RAM.
-
TrueNAS Scale on a Dell R620 — Part 1: Ditching OMV and Installing TrueNAS
I replaced OpenMediaVault with TrueNAS Scale on a Dell R620 — LSI 9211-8i in IT mode, 10x 1.2TB SAS drives, 384GB ARC cache serving VMware NFS datastores. Here is the full installation walkthrough including iDRAC firmware updates, Virtual Media install, and network configuration.