Move freestanding Truenas Core into a Proxmox VM

TrueNAS General
1

Found one thread but it was going the other way… Currently have Core running on server by itself… works great but would like to do a bit more with the server…

Is it feasible to back up my Core Config…
Install Proxmox on the server
Create a VM and then install Truenas Core into that VM…
restore my config file into that install…
and my pools/data etc all be there??

Make sense?
Thanks

Current sys
Supermicro X11SSM-F-O
Xeon E3-1270
32GB ECC Ram
Main pool is Z2 with 5 8TB disks…

2

Or… to add to… should I upgrade/migrate from Core to Scale?
Really have nothing specific planned… this is a home setup running NAS for storage and Plex server…
Just seems like I can do more with the hardware… and it does appear Scale has quite a few more apps to play with…

3

Yes, IF …

If your storage pool disk drives are connected to an HBA, preferably LSI, and you pass-through that HBA to the TN CORE VM. Using a virtual disk drive for the boot pool is fine, but the storage pool must be passed at the controller level. Disk passthrough won’t work and lead to data loss with high probability.

EDIT: just now reading your second question - possibly just switch to SCALE and use its “Apps” feature and if necessary VMs instead of Proxmox.

4

Thanks…
currently all drives are directly individually SATA connected to the Mobo…

if that makes a difference

5

In that case you cannot run any TN virtualised.

So maybe SCALE with its apps and VMs fits your bill.

1 Like
6

You may be able to pass through the whole sata controller.

But then you wouldn’t be able to use sata in proxmox.

In which case you may want to add an LSI HBA… and connect your truenas drives to that, and pass that through.

7

Or… pass through the whole SATA controller to the VM and install Proxmox on a USB SSD. Proxmox itself doesn’t really need to a fast drive I think… the problem is the VM store though. It may not be a good idea to store the VM on that USB drive also, though TrueNAS VM likely doesn’t require much performance, so it may be doable.

That being said, the point of Proxmox is for a hypervisor after all, so yeah that may not be feasible for other VM’s especially if OP plans to use ZFS. ZFS on Proxmox tends to demand a lot of sync write performance, which even normal consumer SSD’s suck at… learned that the hard way.

8

Thanks for all the info… my bad as I wasn’t aware as to how the hardware had to be separate… Will rethink
Probably just migrate to Scale… and maybe just build a MiniPC server to play with Proxmox and other things like that…
Thanks for the direction all!