Best Practices for iSCSI as Primary Storage

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Hey All -

Got Nextcloud up and going via a colocated server - the server is running Proxmox with three VMs:

  1. OpnSense as the firewall
  2. TrueNAS Core as the File Storage with ZFS/ECC RAM, etc.
  3. Ubuntu with Nextcloud

The Ubuntu instance with Nextcloud is running but only has 128GB of storage allocated to it (the physical VM boot drives are limited in storage).

My plan was to use the 128GB for Nextcloud, and mount either iSCSI or SMB as the primary local storage for Nextcloud as there’s TBs available there.

What is the best way to do this? Do I use a plug in, mount iSCSI natively in Ubuntu and expose it to Nextcloud or what?

Thanks

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You have to be very careful when virtualizing TrueNAS. I would highly recommend against it!

But to answer your question, I also have an Ubuntu Nextcloud host that access data from TrueNAS. I use NFS for that. Reason is pretty simple, NFS is a dataset while iSCSI would be zvol. Record size of datasets has many advantages over volblocksize of zvols (fragmentation, efficiency, performance).

You do need to install a nfs client on Ubuntu for that. I would also recommend to move the update backup folder from the NFS share to the local SSD. That speeds up updates a lot :slight_smile:

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this might help Configuring Object Storage as Primary Storage — Nextcloud latest Administration Manual latest documentation but definitely please consider the implications like loosing network access. I don’t really get the point to limit NC storage if all the data is stored on the same hardware at the end (maybe for education purposes?).

If you just want store you big files on a different storage you can just store your files in a different place having apps and DB on a fast storage and data on a cheap one…