TrueNAS NFS and VMware vSphere

Overview

I am not going to mention versions as as soon as I publish, I know they will be out of date. Either way, I was struggling to get TrueNAS NFS attached to my vSphere lab over the weekend and thought I would capture the details here for future reference. For personal reasons, I do not use NFS with my lab, but it was a requirement for a project I was working on and had to figure it out quickly.

TrueNAS Configuration

I already have a Pool configured, called vm-pool. I used all of the available disks for it. I carved out space for a ZFS Volume (ZVOL) for iSCSI and two datasets for NFS.

For the backups dataset, I also have a system user created.

Under the Sharing menu, I selected Unix Shares (NFS) and added two NFS paths.

The first one is for my virtual infrastructure backups, but I configured the paths the same. A few things I wanted to highlight that needed to be configured.

• All dirs selected
• Maproot User set to root
• Maproot Group set to wheel

Under the Services menu, I started the NFS service. There are no configured options. I did experiment with the Bind IP Addresses option, but decided to leave it open.

The vSphere VMkernel port is configured on the same subnet as one of the TrueNAS VLAN interfaces.

When actually trying to connect to the TrueNAS NFS storage, it depended on the interface of the software I was making the connection from.

The first thing is to ensure that the firewall ports are open to the TrueNAS server. By default, TrueNAS uses TCP/UDP 111 and 2049 for NFS v3.

When asked for the server, use one of the configured Bind IP Addresses. If no Bind IP Addresses are configured, use one of the IP addresses from the TrueNAS Interfaces menu. Be sure that the subnet is the same so that you are not routing storage traffic. I use only layer 2 networks for storage.

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vSphere Configuration