Escaping VMware Workstation

TrueNAS General
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Hello :slight_smile:

I recently acquired a spare PC. I currently have my main computer with a single 24TB in it.

I unfortunately started my TrueNAS journey using VMware Workstation using “Use a physical disk” option.

My TrueNAS VMware Workstation disk layout is:

  • Boot drive (NVMe) - virtual drive
  • SSD Cache (SATA-SSD) - virtual drive
  • 24TB NAS Drive (HDD) - “Use a physical disk”

My recently acquired spare PC now has proxmox 8.3-1 installed on it. I want to move just my 24TB HDD over, and leave the NVMe and SATA-SSD behind.

Simply: How can I accomplish this without creating a setup that’s destined to fail?

I’ve read “TrueNAS - Yes, You Can (Still) Virtualize TrueNAS” post, and know I want to use pci-passthrough, but I’m not sure if things are as easy as bringing over the drive, configuring the passthrough immediately instead of directly importing the 24TB disk, or what exactly.

Super nervous of losing data. Really appreciate any assist with this.

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Sorry, then you shouldnt run Truenas on Proxmox. Also then you should not have your data on a single huge drive without redundancy.

Pci passthrough what ? Your sata controller ?

Do you have 2 ? Because otherwise you have no drives to boot proxmox from.

Your HBA ? What model ? Is it in IT mode ? Cooling ?

Questions, questions…

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  1. I’ve heard virtualizing can work. Why not proxmox?

  2. Maybe not PCI passthrough for now, until I buy a dedicated controller. Just qm set ### -scsi1 /dev/disk/by-id/###### for now will be fine?

  3. N/A I think?

  4. cooling is standard.

Work in progress but most of this data has a snapshot on an external drive floating in my house right now. WIP. WIP. WIP!

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In my spare pc, I have a SATA SSD for the boot drive, which I will use with my 24TB NAS drive. It’s an Ironwolf

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Passing through individual discs is a receipe for data loss.

It wil work until suddenly it doesnt and you lose your pool.

Truenas can run VMs just fine. It also runs docker and soon Incus Containers.

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I notice with your setup you are using a GPU for gaming. Does TrueNAS handle GPU passthrough half-decent?

Ideally I do have 2 virtual machines I want to bring over to my new server machine from VMware Workstation. Should that be possible inside of TrueNAS’s system?

For docker containers do you use portainer, or do you use something even more lower level inside of TrueNAS? I find TrueNAS’s docker implementation confusing, if I just simply want to use docker-compose files.

I think ideally if I want to make TrueNAS my main Virtual machine/docker manager server, I need to sort out how to migrate some of my VMs from VMware Workstation first, otherwise, I like your idea using TrueNAS as the main host. :slight_smile:

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This is highly dependent on your motherboard. Server motherboards usually seperate all pcie devices in its own groups. Consumer boards might not.

You can install portainer from the app catalogue and use that instead of truenas own way.

There seems to be a way using dd
https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/comments/wqytpw/comment/ikqoru2/

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A problem that became quite evident last year was that unless you 1) pass-through the HBA to the TrueNAS VM and 2) also blacklist the HBA in Proxmox, Proxmox has a tendency to see the drives attached to the HBA and since it can understand ZFS, import the pools in Proxmox.

When TrueNAS then boots and also imports the same pools it leads to the data being corrupted.

If you are “super nervous” of losing your data you need to make a backup of the vital bits NOW. Do not head into unfamiliar territory configuring a new server if you do not have a proper backup, full stop.

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In theory though it should work good for gaming? My plan was NAS+gaming casual system in my living room.

So provided I do these correctly, I could go years without experiencing “oh my NAS stopped working randomly” besides obvious pitfalls of only having 1 drive or not keeping up with NAS configurations backups?

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Its works decent enough but of course theres some performance loss due to overhead.

Some anti cheat software doesnt allow you to run the game in a VM and bans you…

I use Parsec to remote into the VM.

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Your server can fail at any time for multitude of reasons, this is true no matter what hardware or software you use. But with Proxmox the things I mentioned are specific pitfalls you will want to avoid.

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Sorry if I come off naive. I certainly know this already, but I’m just trying to understand what’s worth sacrificing. I would prefer proxmox in all honesty over a raw TrueNAS host, but I understand a raw TrueNAS host will always be the safest approach.

If I could configure proxmox in a “set and forget” way, understanding that “electronics gonna electron” and “software gunna ware”, than I would be happy with that, so long as I can do my due-dilligences, and monitor things like change logs that would revert meaningful settings that could break my proxmox NAS setup, among other things to stay engaged with.

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Giving you some reading related to Virtualizing TrueNAS.

Virtualize TrueNAS

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In the meantime, if I keep using VMware Workstation until I’m done on the drawing board, I shouldn’t use SMART tests or scrubs isn’t it?

Worried about this whole due diligence thing. Feels like I shouldn’t even using TrueNAS right now until I figure out how to get out of VMware Workstation.

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It would help if you payed the result of running sudo zpool status in the shell.

Once we work out what’s happening with the cache drive, it should be sufficient to backup your config, install TrueNAS onto a fresh boot disk (cheap SSD) and then move the boot disk and the 24TB disk into a new host pc. And restore the config

I would personally forget about running Proxmox on your other PC and just run TrueNAS there.

The HD should be able to be physically moved.

Also, it sounds like you have only one HD. This means you are one failure away from losing the lot.

You may want to consider a second disk so you can setup a mirror.

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So sorry for the late reply Stux!

pool: MAIN
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub canceled on Sun Jan 19 05:48:37 2025
config:

    NAME                                    STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    MAIN                                    ONLINE       0     0     0
      0f2c6cc2-2706-46dc-bab9-af0e7fd9000d  ONLINE       0     0     0
    cache
      000f61c8-9013-4082-93a5-d466b6217421  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

pool: boot-pool
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 00:00:30 with 0 errors on Fri Jan 31 03:45:32 2025
config:

    NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    boot-pool   ONLINE       0     0     0
      sda3      ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

I’m happy this was only brought up until your message here :stuck_out_tongue:
This is definitely a plan but with 24TB it is an expensive endeavor. Looking to buy 2 more I think.

What if I really like the idea of Proxmox? Is there really a lot of concern about running proxmox even with all the many users that still run it, and post videos praising the idea of it?

I normally understand the safety and resilience of a direct host install of an OS like TrueNAS, but missing out on the features of proxmox has me worried of my overall big picture goal. It generally feels like a lot of the concerns can be addressed by explicit, and direct overrides before making the drive fully online on TrueNAS via Proxmox. Also if there comes a point that I simply need to buy a pci controller for direct attachments to the NAS drives, than I can also consider that for the sake of big picture Proxmox + TrueNAS.