Proxmox or TrueNAS Scale

Hi guys. I’m getting my hands on a Supermicro CSE826 X9DRi-LN4F+ as i want to set up an enthusiast homelab. I’ve got a Synology NAS for Storage and want to use the new server as a Router in a VM with 10Gbit SFP+ adapters and VMs for Windows and then run numerous docker containers.

This of course isn’t the best setup, as dedicated router hardware would be better, but getting HW for 10Gbit isn’t that easy, and this server was cheap, and should have enough power for all that.

Now Wendell has been making some interesting videos on TrueNAS, and Proxmox and i see them both competing with each other. As i write, this is a homelab, so i don’t need/want any commercial support, i’ll hack the stuff myself somehow thanks to all the resources i can find online and my many years of Linux experimenting.

So, what are the cons and pros to using the two? I’ve got an old AMD FX 8350 system running Proxmox just to try out the installation and that worked quite well, but the Wendells latest video now makes we wonder if i should try out TrueNAS Scale as well, or if it doesn’t really matter.

Thanks for any input.

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proxmox and run a trunas vm with discs passed through

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Once you start adding disks and having decent backup strategies…

DIY becomes an option…

(both are Linux with openzfs and a UI on top)

… however here’s wendel who decided to look at this thread and answer with a video (… or at least it seems, I’ll give it a watch now). TrueNas Scale: State of the Beta Q4 2021 - YouTube

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I happen to be starting a similar project of a DIY (& open source as possible) home automation/security system/VM home lab server in the upcoming month. I then stumbled upon Wendel’s video mentioned above and here i am.
I had similar questions to the OP about the pros/cons of either. I’m perfectly acquainted with PC and enterprise hardware but am much less acquainted with the software aspect of a project as this. interested to hear a something from people with experience in such topics. Cant wait for more of said series.

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I’ve been running both for a while now. Here are some early observations from truenas scale rc1 versus proxmox:

Proxmox - just plain better for virtual machines and containers. Simpler setup, less fighting back. If you want truenas disk management features and SMB, you can pass through the disks or whole controller to a VM and get best of both worlds.

Truenas scale: running it on my backup system it has been rock solid so far, no downtime in a couple of months. Does not play nicely with virtual machines, with limited options and I couldn’t get GPU passthrough to work even though it is supported. That may be my error though. Truenas scale works nicely with my mellanox network cards, which were never reliable under truenas core.

For now I will stick with proxmox as host and virtualize truenas. It just works.
Maybe this will change over time as scale goes from RC to production.

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TrueNAS Scale was rock solid, but if your storage needs are on the simple side (make a storage pool and share it) and you want to do multiple VMs / containers then I think Proxmox is the way to go for an all in one box. Zfs requires a little more command line action on Proxmox (I already had a pool I need to import), but it has not been difficult at all. Also for what it is worth my Proxmox has been rock solid. I have had some minor issues with containers auto-starting on boot, but I think that is because the start commands are issued before my VM pool is mounted. So it shouldn’t be a difficult solve when I get around to it.

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Well you can create pools and can display zpool status in the GUI. Other than that there is no GUI support for anything related to ZFS. I really hope they improve the functionality. And sharing isn’t possible with Proxmox. You have to install nfs packages and stuff yourself.
I got Proxmox for VMs and virtualized TrueNAS Core for ZFS and all things Storage. Pretty good combo if you can passthrough the controllers and NIC(s).

I didn’t check with Scale, but I don’t use beta stage software for critical data, so I went with core which is a great piece of software.

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Roll your own KVM + Docker + Ceph/Longhorn!

(dont actually do this, as I have been trying to learn it for the past year on and off)

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You mean Kubernetes :wink: Yeah that’s a god damn deep rabbit hole… But it’s great tho. Especially Ceph, haven’t played with rook but cephadm is just great

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Hm, honestly I’d go Proxmox. You can do anything you want on it and it’s far more flexible than scale. Yes, you have a better WebGUI, but honestly a homelab is about tinkering, being flexible and that’s just sth you are not with SCALE. It’s more meant to be an appliance that you set up, do maintenance on and let it run. But on Proxmox you can spin up VMs and Containers as you need, do zfs snapshots of those, mess up, roll back and try again. The VM side on TrueNAS is not comparable and kinda limited. Yes you could virsh dumpxml the VMs manifests and edit them by hand or what, but that’s neither sustainable nor great in the long run. As to the App side of SCALE: Under the hood it’s running Kubernetes, k3s, to be exact and that is something really complex and hard to deal with (at first). If you’re not too deep into docker, dealing with Kubernetes and helm charts is not for you. Besides running a VM (or lxc container) on Proxmox with Portainer and a custom repo gives you pretty much the same app catalog. I am not too big of a fan to doing it that way, but it sure is better than doing it on TrueNAS. Since you can mount folders into lxc containers on Proxmox, you can also easily create a zfs aubvolume for all your apps.

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Thanks for all the great answers. I’m going to use Proxmox. And then see if i need to put TrueNAS in a vm, but i’ve still got a synology for most of my storage needs.

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I have played with them all for years. I actually prefer ESXI or XCP-NG over Proxmox the nag screen kills me. I have a apple Xserve 3.1 duel 6 core machine with 128gb ram running ESXI 6.7 that lets me run windows, Linux and apple VMS.

Just fyi cloudstack is even cooler than vSphere :wink:
It’s also pretty easy to set up

If you don’t want to buy a subscription, you can edit the proxmoxlib.js file under /usr/share/javascript/proxmox-widget-toolkit to get rid of the nag pop up.

I can see how it would be annoying in a home lab but for me, I guess I’m not logging into my main host often enough for it to be annoying.

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Has anyone looked into SUSE Harvester? I’d be interested if anyone has tried running TrueNAS as a VM on it. It’s KVM based so I’d assume all the functionality is there but it does have Longhorn by default so I’m not sure how you’d manage/pass through disks.