TrueNAS as a backup Proxmox node

Apps and Virtualization
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1

There are tons of threads about running TrueNAS as a virtual machine in Proxmox. But I couldn’t find a single one about doing it the other direction.

I’m curious how one could run Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) as a virtual machine, on TrueNAS.

Why?

I have an existing two-node Proxmox cluster, and I thought adding TrueNAS as a third node, could improve redundancy (a third quorum vote) and give me an emergency ‘backup’ compute node (albeit with horrible nested virtualisation), if things got hairy and I needed to spin up a rescue server in a hurry.

I gave it a try - with partial success. The virtual PVE node running on TrueNAS successfully joins the existing PVE cluster, and green lights, with a lot of networking config and trial/error.

However, I could never get SDN passthru for NICs, or (more importantly) any of my NFS storage destinations working in the virtual PVE node. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that the NFS storage for my cluster is in fact the parent TrueNAS itself. Hardly a recommended configuration for a million reasons, but I could not get the PVE guest node to mount (or ping) the TrueNAS NFS interface (same physical, diff VLAN) no matter what config I tried.

Tell me how wrong I am for even considering this, but, then I’m curious if there are any workarounds?

2

Some network configs would help to troubleshoot.

  1. How many NICs do you have on your TrueNAS?
  2. How did you configure the network for the PVE VM?
  3. What is the network configuration inside this node? AFAIK, node should have all the same bridges/swtiches for the on-the-fly VM migration.
  4. How did you configure SDN in your cluster?

I don’t think that I would be able to help, though…

3

Did you set up a bridge in truenas? Otherwise your truenas vms use macvlan interfaces and are isolated from the host and can’t ping/reach it