Hi - Long time viewer, first time poster on the forums.
I’m starting a journey to build a home server along the lines of the Son of the Forbidden Router. It’ll be based on an ASUS w680-ACE IPMI MB, i7-13700k, 64-128GB ECC RAM, 10Gbps NIC, 8 8TB WD Reds (vdev1), 2 2TB SN850 (vdev2) housed in a 4U SM846 case. My use case is typical home server duties - media storage, media serving (Plex), backups, pihole, VPN gateway, *arr apps, Docker, a few Dockerize apps, a couple low power VMs. Everything will be linux based; no windows.
Question I have – Every TrueNAS Scale review or guide I see online seems to use a level 1 hypervisor with TrueNAS Scale running as a VM, and even yet another linux VM for the Docker host. I’d probably favor ESXi to help with work-based learning, but could do XCP-ng or proxmox. Looks like Wendel used Xen on the Forbidden Router series. As of the moment, I am not needing the pfsense or router aspect of that build, so maybe that changes the preferred virtualization/docker approach?
If TrueNAS Scale natively supports running VMs and Docker apps, why not just run Scale on bare iron, and run your Docker apps and VMs natively on Scale? People just don’t trust it yet? People feel the need to snapshot and such? Just trying to figure out my plan and it seems a bit redundant to run TNS as a VM and other linux instances as VMs, when they could just be run directly… or what am I missing?
I tried to run TNS in an early beta as the base of a do it all server and I changed because TNS locks down a lot of the low level infrastructure to keep you from messing up too much. Updates at that point would overwrite low level files / directories. I was trying to get GPU hardware acceleration to work and it would never survive and update. This may have very well been fixed by now?!?
Proxmox on the otherhand is debian with extra interfaces and makes running VMs (and doing anything else debian can do) easier. I currently have a proxmox server that runs a similar load of VMs to what you want to setup (though on much older Xeon E2697 v2 hardware). It works really well, and my NAS needs are so modest I just admin ZFS via the cli on the debian under proxmox.
To be transparent, I’ve yet to even download a TNS ISO. I’m going in pretty blind other than what I’ve learned from the forums. TNS seems to be a good fit as a ‘do it all’ home server OS… yet I’m scratching my head why no one online seems to be using it that way - always as a VM and pretty much only for it’s NAS function. From an efficiency standpoint, it would seem the best approach is to run TNS on bare iron, and run the docker apps and VMs on top of it. Yet, everyone seems to be running a L1 hypervisor and running VMs in parallel.
To your point, the other option I’ve been considering is just running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on bare iron using ZFS for the storage, installing Docker and calling it a day. Or if I want to get fancy, installing Proxmox first… have VM1 being a Ubuntu 22.04 storage instance, VM2 being a Docker platform instance, etc. This would give me some more flexibiity at the cost of a bit more complexity.
Thanks. Just trying to rationalize this in my head as to which is the best approach.
TrueNAS Scale is like EZ mode for a all in one server, and there are a lot of people using them that way. Probably not so much here though, as this forum seems to be more about going all out and not always building to a need.
If your primary use case is a NAS, and you might want some apps and a VM or 2. TrueNAS Scale could be perfect.
If your primary goal is purely a NAS with minimal apps or anything else TrueNAS Core is 4 U.
If a home environment for testing, building servers, trying a bunch of different Ideas and OSs out, and dinking with things is for you. PROXMOX it is,
Hi everyone, I have a question. I currently run Proxmox on a Dell poweredge 730, and I have virtualized TrueNAS-SCALE-22.12.0. Everything works great except for the virtualization in Truenas. For some reason it says my processor doesn’t support it. I run a Xeon E5-2630v4 which does support nested virt. Anyone have any ideas what I did wrong on the setup maybe? Any help would be great. I don’t really need the virtualization in Truenas since I mostly do it in Proxmox, but I’d love to just know the cause.
