Network migration exposes five independent failure layers in storage stack
A planned network migration of a Windows workload and two TrueNAS servers onto a new dual-TOR fabric revealed that storage health cannot be assessed from a single vantage point. The engineer discovered at least five distinct layers in the storage stack — network reachability, service reachability, filesystem state, ZFS kernel state, and physical storage paths — each capable of appearing healthy while masking failures in the next. During the cutover, each layer failed at least once in ways invisible from the layer above, including a missing NIC driver, an unconfigured LAGG VLAN, and ZFS pool import issues. The failures initially appeared unrelated, and only after full recovery did the pattern of layered, independent failure modes become clear. The key takeaway is that migration checklists must validate health at every individual stack layer rather than relying on a single top-level green signal.
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