Test the upgrade on a VM clone

TrueNAS General
1

Hello,
I have a TrueNAS CORE 13 physical server (mostly used as backup repository) that I should begin to upgrade.
As it has a somewhat complex configuration, I wonder if it would be possible to make a ‘clone’ VM (using VMware ESXi) of the server using the backup config, and test the upgrade there first.
I’m not interested in cloning exactly the server, namely, I’m not interested in copying the TB of backups stored there, just the storage structure, with the various datasets of the single data pool, and the various configured services (NFS, etc.)

I did a quick test in that sense, but when the VM rebooted with the uploaded config in console I noticed a few services failed to configure and the datasets were not created.
So my question is: first of all, is it possible to do this kind of cloning, and if so, how should I prepare the fresh VM in order to best accept the uploaded configuration (e.g. should it have already a pool of the same name of the original server) ?

2

Hmm… rethinking to it, I don’t think what I’m asking would be possible.
Datasets are written directly in the ZFS structures, and so during configuration uploading they will re-created while importing the volume, which is the only necessary entity that would be needed to be in the config file.
So, uploading a config file on a different system without also connecting the original disks won’t get too much configured, at least in terms of storage.