Greetings to the entire community. I tried to install TrueNas Core, in the latest version, on a 500GB Samsung SSD, placed inside an HP miniserver with 4 disks of 2TB each. The 500GB SSD already had VmWare ESXi installed. I thought that the two software could coexist, side by side, on the same SSD. However, after downloading the .iso and inserting the boot USB stick, to install TrueNas core, I noticed that TrueNas core, on the disk where I wanted to install it (500GB), deletes all the partitions, so it would also delete VmWare ESXi that was already present on the disk.
Furthermore, among the disks where I could install TrueNas core, the 64GB USB stick did not appear.
Is it possible, therefore, to install TrueNas core alongside VmWare ESXi on the 500GB disk? Has anyone encountered this problem before?
Thanks
TrueNAS - both CORE and SCALE - uses a dedicated disk drive for the operating system installation. It is not possible to share the drive with any other OS.
Well, if you’re installing FROM the stick you cannot install TO the stick. And it is advised NOT to use a USB stick for boot.
It would be possible to install TrueNAS as a virtual machine under ESXi but that begs the question of what you want to achieve and whether you have the technical expertise to do this safely. Not to mention that ESXi doesn’t have much a future in a home lab.
I respect what you wrote, although I wouldn’t be so sure. Consider that I have been using ESXi for 8 years now without problems.
As for the installation of TrueNas, I am pleased to read what I had already intuited. In fact, in my miniserver I have already installed a 250 Gb SSD to accommodate TrueNas Core
I have seen that many people install TrueNas as a virtual machine. In fact, installing it as a virtual machine does not make much sense, in my opinion. I could not tell you, because I have never done it, if managing TrueNas as a VM on ESXi is complicated or not.
Yes, of course.
What method does the user manual recommend?
I followed what is described in this link for the installation.
You apparently did not or we have a gap in our communications. The guide says to use the USB drive as the installation (ISO) media and to boot from it to perform the installation to a different drive. It is not advisable to use a USB Flash drive as a boot device, we speak no lies. A small SSD is the best choice.
As for the future of TureNAS and ESXi, unfortunately it is true, Broadcom no longer allows a home user to use ESXi for free. If you already have a free license then that is great for you however the other folks who do not have that will need to purchase ESXi at a rather large price. For this reason iXsystems has stated that they will no longer be supporting ESXi, meaning that if it works, great, if it doesn’t work then it is not up to them to make it work.
Also, the free version no longer gets updates. I too am in that situation as I place TrueNAS on ESXi and it runs perfectly fine for me, but I have fairly simple tasks.
And 8 years of use with ESXi kind of doesn’t help you when it come to how to run a system because you thought you could install two bootable systems on a single drive and they both would bootstrap independently. That is not possible. You could however create two partitions and put ESXi on one and TrueNAS on the other, and then switch the active partition and boot the computer, but only one would be running at a time.
Complicated, not really, not after you have run ESXi for any period of time. But there are some considerations you must take.
I assume you would be sharing the TrueNAS storage with other VMs and if so, you must ensure all the other VMs are shutdown prior to shutting down TrueNAS. It sounds obvious but you must make sure it happens or data loss will occur. The other major issue we see are people not passing through the entire drive controller. This is a huge one. It is fine if you want to play around to learn TrueNAS and create a few virtual drives however you should pass through all the drives via passing through the controller. You can pass through individual drives (it is a pain to do) however it is not nearly as clean as the entire controller. The boot drive is the only drive I use that is virtual and mine is 16GB disk, more than enough.
Does it make sense to put TrueNAS on ESXi? That depends of some factors. One is how many computers do you want running at the same time. I can run TrueNAS and several other VMs and periodically test an OS all while running a very mature ESXi. It works for me and several others, it may not work for you which is perfectly fine. Imagine the speed you can obtain transferring data between a ESXi hosted TrueNAS share and a VM of a data hungry application! Those speeds are not limited to an Ethernet cable.
I have given you hopefully enough information for you to decide how you want to implement your system. Whatever you do, do not create virtual disks for TrueNAS other than the boot drive, not if you value your data. That is the only major warning I could share with you.
It is not my intention to sound cocky, or like an ass. I only wanted you to grasp the reality of running TrueNAS on ESXi (or any other type 1 hypervisor).
Best of luck to you in your endeavors.
Just for clarity, we will obviously continue supporting ESXi/VMware as a client connecting to TrueNAS - that’s a huge use case for both our community and enterprise users. 
LOL, I guess I understood that but you are correct, I was not insinuating ESXi would not access a TrueNAS server. That would definitely be bad for business. 