I have a RAID 1 configured for 2x 1TB drives on Proxmox. Can I install TrueNAS and use part of the drive say 50GB for VM and 500GB for storage. Will this not affect my Proxmox booting up. What is the best way for this installation.
The best TrueNAS installation with that configuration is none.
TrueNAS is not designed to support virtualized storage. Some people have gotten away with using virtualized storage for their TrueNAS boot device, knowing any problems that occur may require reloading TrueNAS, and restoring the configuration. It’s not recommended.
But, virtualized storage for data pools, no. This has shown to be problematic and prone to data loss.
The only real supported way for virtualizing TrueNAS is PCIe pass through of the storage controller(s), (SATA, SAS or NVMe). That has shown to work quite reliably. (Backups are always recommended.)
Others can speak more about virtualization.
Apparently that’s no longer supported either:
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Thinking about your comment @Stux, I suspect that answer came about because for a while VMWare was the only stable way to virtualize TrueNAS.
With VMWare getting rid of the free options, the remaining methods to virtualize TrueNAS are both less tested, and probably not something iX wants to commit resources to. (iX almost certainly does not have any Enterprise Data Center customers that virtualize TrueNAS.)
While a software development company can use VMWare for development purposes, like testing out the GUI in TrueNAS, committing to other VM hypervisors is probably not viable option for iX.
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Problem is this article, which I guess needs to be updated:
Which states:
When creating a TrueNAS VM for production use, the storage controller must be assigned to the VM via PCI passthrough.
…
Our second choice for a virtualization platform is KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) – which is also the hypervisor layer implemented into TrueNAS SCALE, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Proxmox VE.
@Arwen thank you for the reply. Am new to proxmox and TruenNAS. My question will be again so if i add 2x1TB drives without RAID can I install TrueNAS on one of the drives and usethe same drive for storage? Or can I install TrueNAS on the virtualised drive where proxmoxnis running but use the non RAID drives for storage. How do i mirror the non RAID drives so that i dont loose data if one of them fails. I want to have the same copy of 8data on both drives.
No. Sharing a drive for multiple purposes is not supported with TrueNAS. TrueNAS is designed for the Enterprise Data Center market. As such dedicated drives is a useful feature.
Now it is possible to “share” a boot drive. But the general consensus is that if you have to ask the question, you likely won’t have the knowledge or skills to implement AND maintain boot device sharing without problems. We just don’t want you to loose data.
I have to waste an entire drive just for booting?
In theory yes. But, using virtualized storage for a virtualized TrueNAS installation is less reliable, and has on occasion failed. Again, if you have to ask the question, you may not have the knowledge or skills to recovery after a failure.
TrueNAS uses ZFS for RAID functions. ZFS supports Mirroring of 2 similarly sized drives, so any failure on one, won’t impact the data.
This is the whole point of TrueNAS, using ZFS for ALL RAID functions. ZFS is in a class of it’s own for data safety and reliability.
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