TN Scale Performance with virtualisation (vSphere8U3)

TrueNAS General
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Hi everyone, I am still looking for hardware for Truenas Scale. When I look at the hardware it is very expensive! A Supermicro motherboard X10SDV-4C-TLN4F costs a lot plus RAM, PSU, case, 10Gb NIC and 4 NVME disks etc… Since I still have mini PC’s HP ED800 G6 I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to virtualize TN Scale. The mini PC ED800 G6 has 2 slots for nvme (2 x 4TB) and 64GB RAM, the ngff slot (ex WiFi) is equipped with a 2.5Gb Nic. I don’t need redundancy as the backup runs automatically to another system. Now to the question, which config is best for TN Scale? Should I create several vDisks on the vSphere host (4 x 2TB or 8x1TB), or just one?
Thank you very much for your help!
Best regards
Novell1

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Virtualization has been done successfully but I would tread very carefully as folk have learned the hard way that virtualization can lead to silent corruption. TrueNAS prefers bare metal access to hardware and that’s where your setup likely gets into trouble.

TrueNAS at minimum needs a small boot disk (32-64GB) and the data drives, ideally presented as bare-metal, physically separate drives. ProxMox, et al break that paradigm. Not saying it cannot be done but tread carefully.

Avoiding silent corruption issues is precisely the reason a lot of us go for TrueNAS in the first place, so read up on how to avoid it in virtualized environments.

As for the motherboard you mentioned, ebay recently had a large sale of like motherboards in the $250 range. Quality ECC RAM would likely add same, etc. So not otherworldly expensive. Older motherboards can usually be had for free as long as you also buy a chassis.

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No

You risk pool corruption when using virtual discs. The only somewhat safe way is by PCI-passthrough of a controller (Sata or HBA). Never individual discs.

As for price.
Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 for 70 EUR

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Thanks!
Have nice christmas time

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Assuming your vsphere host is not for commercial purposes, you would do it the other way round with TrueNAS. Install trueNAS on the hardware your vsphere host is currently on, and virtualise whatever is currently in vmware and put that into truenas. And this way you don’t need to purchase any hardware most likely. You should be able to easily back up the vm’s and convert them to something truenas would accept. And this would give you a far more robust file system in the process with some nice advantages.

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