Passing through disks to TrueNAS vm properly

[shub902]

Hi all, I just want to make sure I've done this correctly as I'm new at all this stuff and flying by the seat of my pants.

I've created a TrueNAS vm in Proxmox and I've passed through 8 individual disks by serial number to the TrueNAS vm, then created a ZFS pool in TrueNAS.
All 8 disks are plugged directly into my Asus x99 deluxe board via SATA. Everything seems to be working, however, I'm not sure if I should be able to see the disks in Proxmox. I've read something about making it so Proxmox cannot see the disks, only the TrueNAS vm. I haven't been able to find much about this, maybe I'm not searching for the correct terms.

 

[Dunuin]

Hi all, I just want to make sure I've done this correctly as I'm new at all this stuff and flying by the seat of my pants.

I've created a TrueNAS vm in Proxmox and I've passed through 8 individual disks by serial number to the TrueNAS vm, then created a ZFS pool in TrueNAS.
All 8 disks are plugged directly into my Asus x99 deluxe board via SATA. Everything seems to be working, however, I'm not sure if I should be able to see the disks in Proxmox. I've read something about making it so Proxmox cannot see the disks, only the TrueNAS vm. I haven't been able to find much about this, maybe I'm not searching for the correct terms.

Yes, but thats only the case when using a real physical passthough of the complete sata controller with all disks attached to it (PCI passthrough of a HBA). If you passthrough individual disks those disks are still virtualized and the TrueNAS VM can't see or directly access the physical disks. Thats for example why you can't monitor your disks health using smart inside the VM and why the probably 512B/4K logical/physical sectors of the physical disk will be shown as 512B/512B logical/physical sectors inside the VM.

 

[shub902]

Thank you Dunuin, that makes sense. I will look into HBA passthrough.

 

[Dunuin]

When using individual disk passthrough it is true that you shouldn't mount these disks on the PVE host so you don't currupt data, but its totally fine to for example monitor the smart attributes of the physical disks from the PVE host. So PVE needs to see the disks to be able to virtualize them to be usable by the VM.

 

[shub902]

Thank you, my concern was that I might not be seeing optimal performance under my current setup as a network share, thinking PVE might be occasionally interrupting TrueNAS's access to the disks, even if they aren't mounted in PVE.