Truenas on Proxmox - are there any good options?

TrueNAS General
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Apologies in advance… I know that truenas on proxmox makes most of us want to vomit…

I have been running Truenas scale for a while, hosting various low-load services such as plex (without transcoding) and nextcloud. Recently, I have jumped into proxmox after I was able to grab a very beefy server pretty cheap… HPE Gen9 with 36 cores and 768GB RAM. Now I want to explore proxmox in a cluster setup… and with all the horsepower, everything I have will fit… until I get to truenas. The “ZFS on ZFS” is a bad thing because of the ridiculous overhead… makes sense. I am wondering if there is any other way to run truenas on proxmox without making the system bleed.

One idea I am struggling with is trying Truenas on top of proxmox ceph. Does anyone have any experience or guidance on this? My thought is that I could run a proxmox cluster and have the truenas instance be able to migrate from one node to another, with the ceph storage pool appearing local and consistent regardless of which node the truenas vm was on. And since ceph is not running zfs, there may be less overhead.

I realize this may be a huge waste of time, and I might want to consider abandoning the whole idea. I am trying to sick with Truenas as I do use a separate small bare metal Truenas server as a replication target, and steering away from truenas would likely take me away from replication and the benefits of snapshots.

Thanks for any comments or guidance.

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I have no idea where you’d have gotten that idea.

Sure, you’d do it the same way as with ESXi or xcp-ng: pass through a drive controller to the TrueNAS VM and hook the drives up to that. With Proxmox, since it supports ZFS natively, you’d want to take the additional step of making sure it can’t see the drive controller itself, so that it doesn’t try doing its own ZFS-y things to the attached drives.

But when you’re asking about HA TrueNAS on a Ceph backend, I think that’s well outside what’d be recommended, and I doubt there’s any significant experience with such an arrangement here.

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