Running TrueNAS under Hyper-V?

alex75871 · May 13

I currently have two servers: one Synology NAS and one compute server running Hyper-V. My NAS is nearing retirement, and instead of buying a new NAS, I thought I could virtualize TrueNAS and configure disk passthrough so TrueNAS has direct access to each drive. My understanding is that people shy away from virtualizing TrueNAS because the system favors direct access to the hardware. Although the system will be virtualized, the primary concern is direct access to the hard drives, which would be provided through disk passthrough. Does anyone have experience running TrueNAS under Hyper-V with disk passthrough? Is it reliable? Any gotchas? Is there any other reason, besides disk access, that people shy away from virtualizing TrueNAS?

Thanks for reading

Electronics Wizardy · May 13

Do you need TrueNAS? I"d be tempted to use storage spaces in windows and setup the raid there. Then you get about the same feature set(checksumming with refs, caching, multiple raid levels, snapshots, mixed drive sizes), and can easily make network shares in windows.

m9x3mos · May 13

13 hours ago, alex75871 said:

I currently have two servers: one Synology NAS and one compute server running Hyper-V. My NAS is nearing retirement, and instead of buying a new NAS, I thought I could virtualize TrueNAS and configure disk passthrough so TrueNAS has direct access to each drive. My understanding is that people shy away from virtualizing TrueNAS because the system favors direct access to the hardware. Although the system will be virtualized, the primary concern is direct access to the hard drives, which would be provided through disk passthrough. Does anyone have experience running TrueNAS under Hyper-V with disk passthrough? Is it reliable? Any gotchas? Is there any other reason, besides disk access, that people shy away from virtualizing TrueNAS?

Thanks for reading

I have been running it like this at home for over 4 years with no problems.

Only downside I have run into so far as that truenas can't run smart tests.

I use hdd sentinel on the host and have it run the checks instead.

alex75871 · May 13

15 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Do you need TrueNAS? I"d be tempted to use storage spaces in windows and setup the raid there. Then you get about the same feature set(checksumming with refs, caching, multiple raid levels, snapshots, mixed drive sizes), and can easily make network shares in windows.

I had not thought of using Storage Spaces but am seriously considering it now. The first time I used Storage Spaces was many years ago when it was relatively new, and I had a few issues setting it up, back when the CLI was the primary method of configuring it.

4 hours ago, m9x3mos said:

I have been running it like this at home for over 4 years with no problems.

Only downside I have run into so far as that truenas can't run smart tests.

I use hdd sentinel on the host and have it run the checks instead.

Interesting. Can you confirm you are using disk passthrough? I thought passthrough would allow smart tests to be run.

Jarsky · May 13

5 hours ago, m9x3mos said:

I have been running it like this at home for over 4 years with no problems.

Only downside I have run into so far as that truenas can't run smart tests.

I use hdd sentinel on the host and have it run the checks instead.

You're definitely passing the host controller through and not just individual disks? As S.M.A.R.T tests most definitely works on TrueNAS with smartctl

m9x3mos · May 14

38 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

You're definitely passing the host controller through and not just individual disks? As S.M.A.R.T tests most definitely works on TrueNAS with smartctl

On my older system I had to pass through the individual drives directly. I couldn't get the hba to pass into the vm with that host.

On my newer system that one works fine with hba being passed into the vm and that one does handle smart without issue.

OP said disk passthrough so I responded based on the older of my two systems at home.