Heyo! It’s me again, it’s been awhile and as usual I have questions!
And if this isn’t in the right area, admins please move.
I’m currently running TrueNAS Core as I was just toying with it. Pretty much the only thing it’s doing right now is running an Ubuntu VM for a Valheim server. I quickly realized that a 2TB NAS running SMB, on 16GB of RAM … wasn’t enough RAM for services and running more than one VM at a time, plus it’s on older hardware.
That being said, I want to start over. I got a Ryzen 3600 sitting around doing nothing on a B450 Tomahawk Max board. The plan is to throw a cheap nvme on it for the boot drive, and grab some drives to build the NAS part with(since my WD Home Cloud thing is starting to throw Fault’s on the HDD).
The question is what should I run on it? I plan on putting my NAS on it, VM’s for toying around, a VM for my Valheim for sure, run Plex or Jellyfin or whatever free service there is for the library, maybe put routing on it to bypass the ATT crap that’s on the fiber box.
Is Proxmox basically just a hypervisor? Does it have built-in tools for building a pool for a NAS? Does it have apps/dockers like TrueNAS does for things? Am I going in the wrong direction?
You correctly figured out that Proxmox is a virtualisation solution and not storage solution. That being said it has the tools to build a NAS in a LXC or a VM. I personally use a vanilla FreeBSD VM + Samba + NFS (built in) for a NAS since I don’t need a UI for my NAS, adding a share is a simple as editing 1 file. ZFS on ZFS isn’t as terrible as the FNAS/TNAS community makes it to be and with vanilla FBSD you can go as low as 2GB of memory and still have a decent performance assuming you have 1-2 clients. Running 4GB or more is of course better but if you’re resource constrained FBSD or even NetBSD are great and you will learn a new OS. You could also virtualise TNAS but their requirements are insane. Dedicating disks directly to a VM is a waste of resources and is not needed in most cases, yes it’s more performant but you lose the ability to share this storage with other VMs.
One option is Unraid, which is a NAS with docker and VM support (like TrueNAS Scale). I’ve been using it since 2019 on an old i7-3770. I “upgraded” it a year ago and added a bunch of HDD and it has been working great for my needs.
It is currently running a Windows 10 VM (4 cores & 16GB ram) and a bunch of docker containers (Tailscale, Jellyfin, Satisfactory server, 3x MakeMKV for 3 optical drives, etc).
For a pretty old system, it has worked surprisingly well with Unraid.
Hey ya, just wondering but is it easy to do GPU passthru in it? I’ve played with Proxmox and XCP-NG and found it quite involved, but welcome your thoughts in case I was going about it the wrong way.
As you mentioned you just toying with things, I would recommend Proxmox to future-proof yourself.
If you install TrueNAS there is a limited thing you can do with it.
If you install Proxmox, you can easily spin up a VM passthrough your hard drive and install TrueNAS on it. In case you want to add more functionality to your machine, just spin up another VM and toy with it.
i have started to come across this more and more recently. people that come from hypervisors tend to find ProxMox quite normal. People that come from storage appliances that do a lot of things (home lab people) say a lot that ProxMox is not intuitive and difficult to work in.
as a point to this, i would give you my thumb before i used UnRaid for anything. However some of my friends use it daily, how or why i can not understand.