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Hello there, I'm having issues adding my drives to VirtualBox for a TrueNAS VM.
This is my first time using TrueNAS, VirtualBox and Linux so I'm very new to all this. Because of this I'm having trouble following threads that may have solutions and I can't seem to find a good tutorial anywhere.

I've just built this NAS which is running Linux Mint (cinnamon) and I've installed VirtualBox with the plans of running TrueNAS Scale as a VM in the background. I had no trouble setting up TrueNAS using a 32GB VDI (taken from my primary SSD) but now I'm trying to allocate my four 8TB HDDs to the virtual machine for TrueNAS to use. From what I can tell, VirtualBox doesn't allow me to add VDIs larger than 2TB and I don't understand how to fix this.

All in all, I need to know:
- Do I need to format the drives on my host OS in a certain way for them to be found by VirtualBox? (e.g. Ext4, NTFS or FAT).
- Why won't VirtualBox allow VDIs larger than 2TB?
- How can I make VirtualBox accept my four 8TB HDDs?
- How can I ensure that VirtualBox only creates the new VDIs using the HDDs and doesn't take anymore space from the primary SSD?

Any step by step solutions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! 馃檪

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Any particular reason why you wanna run it in a VM? Just for the sake of data I personally would reverse what you have going on, installing TrueNAS then Mint in a VM, unless it鈥檚 a paid service to host VMs on TrueNAS, I鈥檓 not entirely sure

Anyways I found this Vbox guide from oracle, I鈥檓 not sure if you鈥檝e seen it already but here it is

https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/virtualbox/6.0/admin/adv-storage-config.html#:~:text=As an alternative to using,called raw hard disk access.

edit: I just realized you made it to making the image already, but I鈥檇 try this anyways and see if a VMDK doesn鈥檛 have the same constraints as the VDI

Edited by Bubbles_TPB

idk anymore

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Why are you making a VM? I'd just setup the raid and shares in the host. YOu can use the same ZFS and samba that TrueNAS uses.

Or use QEMU/KVM a much better virtualization system for servers.

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Thanks for the quick response guys! The reason I've gone Linux then a TrueNAS VM is because I need the display output for Linux to come straight from the NAS. I wasn't sure if you could do that with TrueNAS as its generally controlled from a browser on another computer.

Is it possible to run the VM (in this case linux) from the display output of the NAS?
If so I'll definitely change things around and run TrueNAS as the host OS.

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12 minutes ago, Morgaming said:

Thanks for the quick response guys! The reason I've gone Linux then a TrueNAS VM is because I need the display output for Linux to come straight from the NAS. I wasn't sure if you could do that with TrueNAS as its generally controlled from a browser on another computer.

What are you doing with that display output? Playing media?

12 minutes ago, Morgaming said:

Is it possible to run the VM (in this case linux) from the display output of the NAS?

You can do that with GPU passthough if you have compatible hardware.

Why do you want trueNAS? Seems easier to just run ZFS and samba shares on the host.

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20 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What are you doing with that display output? Playing media?

You can do that with GPU passthough if you have compatible hardware.

Why do you want trueNAS? Seems easier to just run ZFS and samba shares on the host.

I want to use the NAS for streaming movies, using google, youtube, etc... My idea was to use a application like Kodi.

Also for the NAS software I just need something that works well, is easy to pick-up and understand and is free.

My display output is coming from the integrated graphics of my CPU (Ryzen 5 5500GT)

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22 minutes ago, Morgaming said:

I want to use the NAS for streaming movies, using google, youtube, etc... My idea was to use a application like Kodi.

Also for the NAS software I just need something that works well, is easy to pick-up and understand and is free.

My display output is coming from the integrated graphics of my CPU (Ryzen 5 5500GT)

So just make a smb share with samba and you have a network share. Should be lots of guides out there for it. I'd stick with WIndows or linux mint here. I don't see a need for a NAS os for this use then. Should be much simpler than using a VM.

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12 hours ago, Morgaming said:

Alright awesome, I'll look into doing that. Just to clarify, Samba is a software I can install onto e.g. Linux Mint and run in the background 24/7?

Yup. Its actually the same software used in TrueNAS for its network shares.

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