Migrate SCALE install from Proxmox to bare metal: networking?

TrueNAS General
,
1

I know questions of this sort come up semi-regularly, e.g. fairly comprehensively here, but I’d like to be sure of this issue.

I’m currently running TrueNAS SCALE 24.04.1.1 under Proxmox. I have passed through the entire LSI 9211-8i that runs my main pool, and (individually) two U.2 drives that are mirrored to form an app pool. TrueNAS itself is working great, but I’m not happy with Proxmox, which has been notably unstable, and I’ve been unthrilled with the community support, so I got a separate box, installed XCP-NG on it, and moved my VMs over there. (So far, while there are things I prefer about Proxmox, everything’s been rock-solid.)

I’d now like to get off Proxmox entirely, and install SCALE on the original box, bare metal. It will be vastly overpowered, but whatever.

I understand that I should be able to just export my config, install TrueNAS onto the machine, and reimport the config. The one thing I’m concerned about is what happens to the networking setup when I do this. The existing setup has two network interfaces (a “regular” one, and a 10GbE link going directly to a backup TrueNAS core machine); both of these are using Proxmox bridge network devices, not passed-through network controllers. What happens when I restore the config? These virtual devices don’t exist as such on the bare-metal box. I’m concerned about getting bricked when I restore a config having network devices that no longer exist.

2

By default TrueNAS tries to use DHCP for all interfaces in case there is no configuration for any interfaces.

That might not be the case as you load the config.

You should probably expect to connect a monitor/keyboard to reconfigure bare minimum of networking through the CLI interface.

3

A good way to go back to metal is to connect another disk that you’ll use as boot (at least temporarily), pass that through virtually, attach it as a mirror to your existing virtual boot device in truenas.

Let it finish resilvering.

Then reboot the metal and select the new device in the bios.

Then you can detach the now missing original virtual boot.

1 Like