I’ve mentioned this over on the other TrueNAS ARM64 thread, but I’ve gotten Proxmox and TrueNAS VM’s working on MikroTik CCR2116’s and RDS2216, and I am now looking at getting TrueNAS to run bare metal on both (primarily the RDS2216). Both have 16 2-GHz cores and loads of ports.
This is the stack of 2216’s in the lab before being moved to the server room.
The bottom three of these are running Ceph with 1TB SSD’s inside them on the NVMe M.2 slot.
The top two have 8-port SATA adapters in the M.2 slot, each handling 4-5 HDD’s and 3-4 SSD’s. They have TrueNAS as a VM, each with 8GB of RAM, sharing a mirrored array of HDD’s and SSD’s for meta/small files. They replaced my 2012 Mac Pros, and consume 50-70w at load. Compare that to the Pro’s 200W idle (before drives & load). Sure, I could probably get more RAM cache performance out of the Macs, but these arrays aren’t heavily hit.
The RDS2216 goes for about $1600-1800, depending on where you get it. Much more affordable than UI’s solution, esp. for small installations and home labs. You get 20 NVME U.2 slots up front, 2 M.2 SATA slots inside, 2x100G, 4x25G, 4x10G SFP, 2x10GBE on the back, and 32GB of RAM (not great, but not horrible for the price).
I’m at a point where I have a custom kernel and drivers that will boot the routers into Proxmox without touching the onboard NAND, and leveraging @Joel0’s work I expect to have that same kernel + driver stack land me into a modified TrueNAS SCALE installation on an onboard disk (USB, SATA, or NMVe).