The hypervisor dilemma

TrueNAS General
1

So I thought would get a general opinion to see what others say, I’m currently on the fence because I haven’t had time to test TrueNAS Scale/CE VM’s/Containers/LXC

My current situation is I have a TrueNAS Core server that I’m planning to upgrade to TrueNAS CE later on when I get the time. But right now its a low priority compared to my hypervisor machines I’m running.

Currently I am running 2 Proxmox VE’s with ZFS as its base, one on a old supermicro atom board with 8gig of ecc ram and another on a free old Dell Xeon machine with 16gig of regular ram.

I’ve recently bought some new components to upgrade the old atom machine so I can consolidate it all into one hypervisor machine:

  • ASRock - B650D4U-2L2T/BCM
  • AMD Ryzen 5 9600X
  • 2x Micron 32GB (1x32GB), PC5-38400 (4800MHz) ECC DDR5 UDIMM

Currently amongst the hypervisors, I’m running on them the following VM’s/LXC:

  • VM: pfSense
  • VM: home assistant OS
  • LCX: docker running a few containers.
  • I’m planning on implementing frigate NVR outside of home assistant OS as well and using it for home security, currently just trialing it under HAOS.

These are the ones that will work all the time even under UPS backup if the power goes out. So will be of the highest uptime (obviously not enterprise uptime) but for home use high enough.

The main TrueNAS server with all the spinning rust will automatically shutdown as soon as there is a power outage due to its power consumption instead of letting it draining the UPS.

The plan is to have the data on the high up time hypervisor machine backed up to the main TrueNAS server as well when it can.

The thing I don’t like about Proxmox is the ZFS dataset management or the lack of via the web UI. I get it, its purely a hypervisor but still hypervisors store data and having better data management would be a good thing.

I like the way TrueNAS does it, whilst I’m not opposed to doing dataset management via the command line in proxmox, I just would prefer a web interface due to the lack of time in my life.

But I’m wondering what peoples take would be on using TrueNAS CE to be the hypervisor vs Proxmox ?

For the time being I can stick to Proxmox but with the upcoming TrueNAS CE 25.10 would it be a worthy contender to be a hypervisor over Proxmox with its better NAS/ZFS goodness ?

Does any of IXSystem enterprise clients actually use the VM’s/Containers on TrueNAS I wonder ?

2

Its what I do.

Including running a pfSense VM.

The major issue is that you lose the pfSense VM while you update the TrueNAS, which perhaps happens more often than you would update Proxmox.

Would be nice to have a dual TrueNAS setup with HA pfsense VMs.

3

I haven’t tried Fangtooth at all yet, and my experience is with Electric Eel so take that as a grain of salt before reading the rest of my response. I tried running electric eel bare metal as my main OS on my server. The lack of hypervisor features compared to Proxmox made that a no go for me. I ended up virtualizing TrueNAS on Proxmox using a passed through HBA. Works great. In your case, I would personally run Proxmox on the new hardware, and create a dedicated storage network direct to the TrueNAS box. I keep very little data on Proxmox. I use NFS shares and the NFS driver in Docker, and all of my data is stored directly onto TrueNAS. The only backups I do from Proxmox are to backup my VMs and CTs, one copy to my synology and one copy to my TrueNAS. My VMs are all very small, 32GB or less, so I really wouldn’t get much benefit from PBS or Deduplication. My VMs take up around 1-2 GB each after compression.

In your case you could create a data storage pool on Proxmox in a similar manor and periodically send snapshots to TrueNAS. I don’t shut down my spinning rust in a power outage so that may complicate things. I have my UPS backed up by a Ecoflow Delta 2 powerstation that gives my entire homelab about 4 hours of run time in the event of a power outage. Usually I will have the backup generator running long before the 4 hours is over.

BTW, my main server, even with TrueNAS virtualized and all my workloads running idles at 40 watts and almost never exceeds 75 watts. My entire homelab draws about 180 watts. So that plays a factor as well.

4

Would it make sense to get one of the lower power firewall appliances and run a hypervisor on it? Or get a lower power thin client and put a network card in it to use as a hypervisor?

The lower power draw would allow your UPS to last longer, though storage on these devices is usually pretty limited. Things like HP T740 and T755 (used) come to mind, but they only have an m.2 SATA and an m.2 NVMe socket, you’d need to decide how much networking you want before moving on. Fill the PCIe 3x8 socket with a low profile network card, or just use the wifi socket to house an a+e Intel i226-v card. Intel dual x520 cards work, I have them in mine, Intel quad i350 work, also have one in mine. Looking at stepping up to a quad x710 card in some of my T740 to use the PCIe lanes more effectively. Still working on this last upgrade to decide if it matters for my lab.