TrueNAS Scale or Proxmox plus TN Scale VM for my new home server?

Operating Systems & Open Source Open Source & Web-Based
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My new home server

  1. Overview
  • Replaces my old QNAP NAS (TS-453 Pro)
  • Wants ZFS in all situations (TN or Proxmox)
  • Basic file sharing (e.g. SMB?)
  • Apps/Servers to run
    • Minecraft
    • Jellyfin
    • Navidrome
    • qBittorrent
  • Additional VMs
    • Linux hosts for containers (managed by Ansible, currently using cloud VMs) (reverse proxy, Prometheus, etc.)
    • Windows VMs for fun/testing?
  1. Hardware
  • Threadripper 3960x, 128GB DDR4 RAM
  • 1x Geforce GTX 970 (Was still being used a few months ago lol)
  1. Storage
  • 6x Spinning Rust 10TB
  • 1x Intel SSD 80GB (Early SSD series) (as boot drive?)
  • 1x Samsung Evo 850 1TB (L2ARC or other purposes)

Questions

  • TrueNAS Scale vs Proxmox + TN Scale Pros and Cons?
  • Proxmox + TN Scale HDD Passthrough any potential long term caveats?
    • Can fallback to another option without data loss if things go south?
  • If Proxmox + TN Scale used, how to setup for my requirements?
    • Can purchase additional drives if necessary but less likely to get more big HDD until sale
    • Totally have no idea where to put VM disks
2

it sounds like all you want is a clean GUI for SMB on top of a proxmox install.

What about just doing Proxmox as your base, share a container w/ persistent mapping to your ZFS pool and then use something like Webmin to be your GUI?

3

proxmox as the base. passthrough a dell HBA330 to a VM and run TrueNAS core for your storage duty, with the 10tb spinners.

get 1 more Samsung Evo 850 1TB and use proxmox zfs to mirror them for the VMs to reside on. 1tb of ssd is a fair amount of storage for a VM pool and will handle the apps and servers you are building. at some point you can get 2 more SSDs and add another ZFS mirror to your pool also. this will expand the VM storage pool by however much you want too.

as you build VMs on the 1tb ssd set, you can attach them to the TrueNAS storage for the torrent pool and Jellyfin usage.

4

Thanks for the answer
Any reason you pick TrueNAS core over Scale?

Also for containers/VMs, what & how to store different stuff on SSD & spinners?
Totally newbie in proxmox

Update: Checked The Difference Between TrueNAS Scale and TrueNAS Core - YouTube
Core is faster (SMB and stuff), no virtualization but is ok when proxmox is present
Will download ISO now (I only got scale one downloaded)

1 Like
5

Haven’t heard of Webmin before
Will research more

How would you compare Webmin with TrueNAS? (As interface for… SMB? ZFS management?

U1: Watching Best Web Interfaces For Linux - YouTube

6

For VM whatever storage (disk image I guess), does endurance or performance matter more?

I am comparing

Both got good price and I guess I can buy a pair (no point getting another Evo 850/860, the price is too similar to NVMe SSDs to justify)
KC3000 = normal consumer SSD performance & endurance (800 TBW, ~1m IOPS)
M470 = High endurance, lower performance (1600 TBW, 600k IOPS)
M470 is slightly cheaper

7

i would not compare them. Webmin is like the Great Grandfather of web based ui management tools. it is still a great bit of kit, and can be useful, but there are ready to go utilities now. Webmin is like buying a supercar from Ikea.

yes*
in a home lab everything is budget vs use. i have a seperate NAS that i manage that is on 10yr old hardware with the Truenas install loaded on to a pair of 60GB kingston desktop SSD that might be teenagers now.