What is YOUR usecase? Is this home use, SMB, Enterprise, etc? How Many VMs? Are you a VMWare customer looking for a “free” option?
In my life i did lots of migration in any directions between VMware, Hyper-V and Proxmox (with ZFS as the main filesystem). So when i see how-to convert VMware VM to TrueNAS it makes me sick. It’s 2024 now! Why do we need to manually determine exact disk size, create zvol and convert vmdk to raw? In Proxmox it’s one-liner: qm importdisk VMid VMDKfile zvolume --format raw. Even in Synology there are WebUI options for importing and exporting VMs.
I’ve toyed with creating a migration assistant tool with a simple Python script. I have parts of it built and it works, but haven’t gotten it into a state worth sharing. It effectively just does exactly what you are describing manually, but with prompts at the terminal. The value here is limited, because it’s something you only have to do once.
Perhaps make a feature request for importing VMDKs in the WebUI. Latest Feature Requests topics - TrueNAS Community Forums
I wrote about using TrueNAS SCALE as a hypervisor, and have done some cool stuff with it.
Using TrueNAS Scale as a Hypervisor
Using TrueNAS SCALE to build a “Datacenter In a Box”
But its not VMWare or Proxmox. It’s a storage device that can do virtualization. I’m sure more love will come to the hypervisor, but it hasn’t been a focus of development.
But even in that case you have no simple way to backup and restore VMs. In Hyper-V there is Windows Backup, in Proxmox there is Backup feature, in VMware there are a lot of commercial and free tools. And the TrueNAS forum says “use snapshots”. Snapshots are not a backup. Backup is a file.
Couple of things here. You can replicate the ZVOL (and all of its snapshots) for your VM to another location, either on a differant pool on the same system, or on a remote system. This is rather trivial and easy to do.
What you can’t do, however, is do a backup of the VM configuration, which may have some issues with licenses on certain software. The BIOS Serial Number and MAC addresses are generated when you create the VM, and if it changes (like creating a new VM and pointing it to the ZVOL), then evil software may break.
Again, if you’d like to see this feature I’d happily vote for backing up the VM as an entity (including its configuration file and all ZVOLS/disks) you can make a feature suggestion. I’d happily vote for this.
File which can be easily copied to the external drive, remote server, uploaded to S3 and so on.
You can. With dd, make a container for your ZVOL in a file. You can also back it up to tape by just dding the ZVOL to a tape.
Using LTO Tapes to backup your TrueNAS?! - Resources - TrueNAS Community Forums