TrueNAS running within a VM (like proxmox).

lowstrife · April 11, 2021

So I'm in the final stages of building my first home server.

Hardware is my old Ryzen system:

1700x

32GB

6x6TB Exnos discs ($140 each for Exnos drives? What a deal)

LSI 9217 HBA

80GB boot SSD

(side note 1: I know the system only has gigabit connectivity to my desktop, but that's fine. I can always upgrade to 2.5G or 10G connectivity down the road)

(side note 1.1: My main desktop has nvme SSD's, and I would expect the RAID array to bench around 3-5G with these drives, so I could take advantage of >1G connectivity)

(side note 2: My main desktop is running Windows)

Goals:

New fileserver for my data collection which is currently ~7TB out of 7.3TB. This currently exists on two mirrored 8TB discs on my primary machine.

Host to run t*rrent clients

Host TrueNAS Samba Share for the data it contains

Host for Plex (optional, I can also run plex off of my desktop which accesses this NAS)

Host for data replication of the ZFS pool data to my on-site backup as my old 8TB discs will become backup discs. (this can be done within TrueNAS I believe?)

Host for any future VM's I may want to deploy in the future, considering the abundance of hardware. I want to start toying with a linux system and expanding capabilities. This may include:

Automated data collection from API's
Security camera host
Garage door opener host (a'la Linus's most recent video)
VPN host so that I can access my home network from abroad

My main question is - should I setup TrueNAS within a VM? Would that make my goals\future expansion easier? Or, should I run virtualization ontop of TrueNAS. I've done some digging to show that TrueNAS can run within a VM:

But adding complexity like this might not be the best idea for a beginner like me. Any input on how I should structure my system, and whether running truenas in a bare metal state would be able to achieve my goals? I know the optimal setup is to have a NAS be a dedicated and unique system just for data storage, and all of your VM hosting and excess processing sh ould be done on a seperate bare metal box. I'm just curious on my options here.

Many thanks everyone.

Electronics Wizardy · April 11, 2021

Is there a reason why you want truenas in the vm? Id ju make a container in proxmox for smb/samba shares. Then let proxmox handle zfs and drives.

GTM · April 12, 2021

Hi, I'm running wmware esxi 6.7 for about 3 years on consumer hardware (intel i7 6700k, Gigabyte Z170M-D3H, 24GB RAM, 250GB SSD).

I'm running esxi of an 16GB microsd card, the virtual machines are stored on the ssd. I added an PCIE sata3 card with 10 ports with 8 hdds for mass storage (4TB each). I added the PCIE on the pass through list.

I'm running FreeNas 11.3, Pihole, home assistent and a win 10 machine. Most ram (16Gb) is assigned to FreeNas thats running (Plex and other plugins). Windows has 4GB of ram and has some usbs pass through.

Every thing is running good for the moment. Only one incident, one hdd died, replaced it, resilver went ok. Performance is ok, 130 Mbps transfer over local network from FreeNas.

The only change I want to make is move the plugins from FreeNas to standalone VM, file permissions are killing me.

Have fun!