TrueNAS NFS Setup For XCP-ng and Linux

In the video below, we cover how to set up NFS Shares in TrueNAS

Several operating systems can take advantage of NFS

This is more popular for Linux computers and hypervisors so we also cover how to configure a Linux client and an XCP-ng hypervisor

One of the main benefits for hypervisors like XCP-ng is that NFS provides an opportunity to provide shared storage between nodes

This allows VMs to be migrated from one node to another

Whilst not as fast as iSCSI, one of the benefits of using NFS on a NAS like TrueNAS is that the NAS has visbility of the files making it easier to backup and restore individual files for individual VMs, without requiring additional software

We begin with how to create user and group accounts in TrueNAS for access permissions, how to create a dataset and how to share that using Unix shares aka NFS

Next we show how to attach to an NFS share for use as an ISO storage for XCP-NG

Because we want to upload CD images to this share, we cover how to create a matching user and group account in Linux so that the name and IDs match

For example,

sudo addgroup --gid 3000 grpxcpusers  
sudo adduser --uid 2000 fred  
sudo usermod -g grpxcpusers fred  

Then we show how to install the NFS client software (nfs-common) on a Linux computer to be able to mount NFS shares as well as Autofs to automate the mounting and mapping of an NFS share to a folder

For example,

sudo apt update  
sudo apt install nfs-common  
sudo ap install autofs  
sudo nano /etc/auto.master  

/nfs /etc/auto.nfs  

sudo nano /etc/auto.nfs  

ISOs -fstype=nfs4 172.16.20.30:/mnt/Pool1/ISOS 

And how to update the client software for use with NFS version 4

sudo nano /etc/default/nfs-common  

NEED_IDMAPD=yes  
NEED_GSSD=no # no is default  

sudo service autofs reload

Because the user and group accounts do not show correctly on the Linux computer we show how to correct the domain mapping issue

For example

sudo nano /etc/idmapd.conf 

Domain=templab.lan

Because shared storage is a very useful feature for hypervisors like XCP-NG we demonstrate how to set up a VDI storage in XCP-ng to advantage of an NFS share in TrueNAS

Finally we cover the performance pitfalls of NFS and how you can disable the synchronous writes in TrueNAS to get around this, but also the preferred option of how to create a ZLog aka write cache in a TrueNAS system that uses ZFS

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