I am learning VMware (prepping for either VCP-VVF or VCP-VCF), hoping to elevate my pay… What was said about VMware having all that polish to make things easier and complete can not be discounted. I also run XCP-ng in production at work, which is certainly a simple thing to get going if you don’t need HCI storage.
I’m thinking about what’s next on my plate, either I look at Nutanix, or I look at Harvester. Harvester is looking interesting because it is built on Kubernetes, is simple to deploy more K3s, and I need to learn some sort of container workflow (this being the hardest way to go forward but…).
As far as using Truenas for a hypervisor, it’s not high on my list. I’ve done it in the past, it worked OK for the one VM I needed to run, but it was a pain getting it working (Bhyve times). I use several for storage (bare metal), it works great here and my XCP-ng attaches to it with NFS. In my “lab” I have Truenas, plus vSphere 8, and XCP-ng, plus more if I want to crank the power back up to 11.
Top row: XCP-ng 3 host pool, XCP-ng standalone host, Parrot OS workstation
Next row: vSphere8 cluster, Truenas
Bottom section is old HP DL360 Gen8 that I was using before switching to minilab.
Networking is on the back side of the rack.
I went from 400+ watts at idle with the dl360 to 200 watts at idle with the HP T740 (all of them) and the smaller Truenas (n100 based board). I could drop it farther if I bought SATA SSD for the NAS or made other drive changes (nvme mirror is possible, and may be faster, but I’ve spent too much money on it in the last 6 months).
It got kicked out of it’s last home, and now it looks like I did all the work for nothing.
So my journey of trying to collapse to a 1 box solution continues.
Virtualizing CORE under ESXi failed due to a “doorknock/doorbell” crash. Likely my own fault as I was using a 2008 based chipset on my 1 SAS adapter. But alas, I backed away and went back to 3 boxes.
I am hesitant to update to SCALE on my thick TrueNAS system as I had some iSCSI issues with VMware. Pretty sure I can deal with that somehow.
Final thoughts though - I really want to be able to try TrueNAS 25.04.02 when it comes out and see if I can simply collapse to a single box with TrueNAS as my hypervisor. I do not run crazy stuff - lots of little dockers, couple simple windows systems, Veeam community edition and pfSensePlus (gods I would like to keep my license somehow).
Looking forward to testing SCALE again.
On a side note: I LOVE snapshots - they saved my bacon when iSCSI issues murdered a zvol that was shared to a Windows initiator. Best thing ever to be able to simply clone, test then rollback when happy.
I hear ya, having one machine that runs all is great idea. That was my intention back in the day, but I’ve settled for a 3 machine solution…
1 main TrueNAS server with all the power sucking spinning rust… this will host services not critical to home infrastructure and a backup target for all the home devices, so it can be powered off immediately via UPS due to power failure, this is what it does for the moment.
1 backup TrueNAS server because raid is a not a backup, comes on once a week to replicate snapshots, its a home lab so I don’t need to have enterprise grade to the minute backup… even though my dirty little secret is it’s been off for months due to it sitting on the floor of the lounge room as I figure out how to build a mini home server room on the cheap that works.
1 lower powered ssd only Proxmox server that hosts all the critical home infrastructure, Firewall, Security, Home Assistant, home business software, etc… this is up for as long as possible thanks to UPS… and is backed up to main TrueNAS Server.
I would like the Proxmox server to be a TrueNAS CE (server) down the track if they can get their hypervisor and container system sorted, mainly because TrueNAS ZFS management is far superior to Proxmox. but right now Proxmox is easier to use/learn and I feel its hypervisor and lxc is better than TrueNAS but then I’ve not had a chance to play with CE (scale) scale yet. I’m still stuck on TrueNAS Core for my main server due to no time to upgrade.
I suppose if I had the cash and TrueNAS gets its hypervisor/container stuff sorted once and for all and have it used by their enterprise customers, then I would replace all the spinning rust with ssd’s and could consolidate to 2 server solution, main server and backup server… just throw all the spinning rust in the backup server but you could still have it take over from the main server if the situation arises at the price of a hungry electricity monster…
Now who wants to give me a cool $100,000 AUD to make my dreams come true and ixsystems a cool $10,000,000 to get their truenas hypervisor/container system enterprise grade so all our dreams come true ?
I would guess that most Truenas Enterprise users are using dedicated hypervisors, SOHO might maybe consider using Truenas as a hypervisor, but XCP-ng runs on so many things that it just isn’t worth doing to save 60 watts of power and a few hundred in hardware costs.
