TrueNAS and VMware Optimal Configuration?

Greetings all! First post here so hopefully it’s in the right place.
I have a TrueNAS X20 with an X60 bay attached and am setting up 3 new hypervisors in a VmWare cluster environment. I already have the networking side setup but was curious to see what you all think on the storage side. Plan is to do all storage over iscsi and present each target to all 3 hypervisors. I plan on having 1 iscsi target per VM. All disks in the TrueNAS are set up with one master pool.

My question is, for a conventional/standard setup in this manner, would you create a dataset in the pool for each VM, then a Zvol under each dataset for the iscsi target? Or just skip datasets altogether and go straight to zvols under the master pool?

What are the benefits of doing it either way?

Thanks!
-Mike

Having 1 iscsi target per VM is not typical and if the reason for that is to allow for more granular snapshots then I would suggest using NFS to make thinks easier. As for the organizing them under one dataset or each individual one, that is really up to you. The only thing you gain is per dataset settings that only matter if you are going to change things on that granular of a level.

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@LTS_Tom Thank you!
You caught me using terms wrong. I meant having one target but having a seperate zvol for each VM.

There is one other thing I’m stuck on - Thought I had the networking side down but now I’m second guessing myself. I set up an LACP LAGG on the TrueNAS with two 10gbe NIC’s. From there, each one is going into a separate Cisco 9500 series switch, which I set up in a stacking configuration with 1 port from each switch aggregated via port channel.
The idea was to do the same with each ESXI host on those two switches, although now I’m wondering if I should have stacked the switches, or configured them separately on different subnets, delete the LAGG on the TrueNAS and just let iscsi Multipathing handle everything?

I read somewhere this evening that someone recommended not binding NIC’s on either system, doing separate subnets and do iscsi multipath in round-robin on the esxi side. What would you do if it were you?

p.s. I did check to see if you had a video on this before posting! :slight_smile:

Either should work, I have not done a video but might in the future as I have tested and multipath does work fine with XCP-NG.