TrueNAS VM experience: boot media, permissions, UEFI, and SSH access problems made VMs unusable for me

TrueNAS General
1

I spent most of a day trying to get a simple VM working on TrueNAS, and I wanted to document the problems in case they help others decide whether this is the right platform for their use case.

My goal was straightforward: run a NAS on one machine, while also using VMs for other services, e.g., a Minecraft server, an OpenClaw AI agent. In practice, the VM experience has been extremely frustrating and has not behaved like a reliable virtualization platform.

What I ran into:

  • Adding a CD-ROM/ISO device failed with permission errors involving libvirt-qemu not being able to read the ISO path.

  • The installation started from the web console, but regularly, keyboard and mouse interaction with the web console stopped working, requiring to close the tab, click again on Display in VM details, and re-enter my VM password.

  • Shutting down the VM doesn’t always works, sometimes generating CallError of some sort. A full shutdown was needed to remove the CD-ROM device after installation.

  • The installed OS worked but only from the browser, no way to SSH into the VM. I tried to create a Bridge network interface and used that for the VM’s NIC, to no avail. Now web console shows an empty screen all the times, so cannot reach my VM at all now.

  • SSH into the VM failed, even with a bridged network interface associated to my main NIC. No, I don’t have a super-computer with multiple NICs and using VMs should not require that. Keep in mind most consumer-level main boards only has one network port, so having to dedicate a port for VM bridge is not great.

At this point, the VM functionality feels misleading. If a feature cannot reliably create, boot, stop, restart, and connect to a VM without a long series of workarounds, it should be presented much more cautiously. A basic VM should not take half a day of repeated attempts just to get to a usable state.

For context, a plain Ubuntu installation with direct disks and no RAID+ZFS was much simpler and more versatile for me. I migrated to TrueNAS upon recommendation of a friend, but now I regret it and there is no easy path behind as that would require exporting all the stored data somewhere, reformat and reimport. I understand TrueNAS is primarily a storage platform, but if VM support is included, not advertised as preview/beta, I would expect it to work at least at a basic level without this much friction.

I’m posting this because I suspect other users may run into the same issues and waste a lot of time before realizing this may not be the right solution for their needs.

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I gave up on TN VMs over a year ago. Even if they improve it, the management and flexibility is not there. I use XCP-NG hosting the shared storage on TN and it works fantastic. In fairness to the TN team, this is just something they added to help home gamers out, no serious corporation is going to running VMs on TN and TN is not a VM management system.

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I don’t blame anyone for giving up on TN for VMs.

But it does signal lower IT/Computer capabilities and understanding, range, tools.

TN Scale has yet to provide a semi full solution.

It’s not in the architecture anymore, virtio is great, but now it all in their GUI.

You can get smart and workaround their limitations (virt manager, CLI scripts, db changes etc), but the GUI is still needed to create the Spice Display, which is nice for quick checks).

I’m simply content that they work fine, once configured properly.

Been using them since Scale first came out and right around the time Broadcom took VMware.
(Was using free esxi, plus TN to receive VMware backups).

KVM and virtio are established technologies so no excuse for them to not be implemented properly by anybody else.

I’m prompted to just go to Ubuntu and do it all myself, but I can make TN work my way mostly.

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sorry you had such a terrible experience, not had any issues with my TrueNAS quite like that - and i abuse it a lot.

you didn’t post any detail and that was a lot of issues, are you still looking for help?

if so what one would you like to work on first?

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In fairness, Truenas is pretty fantastic and dramatically better than rolling your own NAS system (or IMHO any other NAS solution out there). Most things work well, but the VM system “works” but is not awesome compared to purpose built VM system, which it is definitively not built to be. Promox or XCP-NG are way better solutions for managing VMs. Truenas is a NAS solution that allows your to manage VMs, but it takes work and research to get it working correctly.

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