Virtualize TrueNAS

Hey everyone!

I’ve build a server, lunched a Hyper V, and than virtualized TrueNAS Scale. Everything is working fine accept that I just cant figure out the network part yet. When I change my TrueNAS IP to static IP (something close to the current ip ) it becomes inaccessible over new ip!

I’ve tried several times according to TrueNAS videos and instructions and it just doesn’t work. It’s accessible by new ip when I set a static IP. So I continue using TrueNAS over DHCP and dynamic ip.

Any ideas what might be the problem ?

This is the problem: You should not “USE” TrueNAS over Hyper V.
Type 2 hypervisors are only suitable to play with and experiment; not for production.

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I am sorry, but this is not useful!
I had the same problem with my system on bare metal.
I changed the IP through the console, but then the WebUI was inaccessible after that.
(my router died, and the new ne had a deffault IP range (192.168.0.x instead of the old 192-.168-178.x) First I tried to change the IP range in the router, but then the router also locked me out completely, it was not available neither on the old, nor on the new IP address, so I reseted it)

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Let me ask what is the point of virtualizing TrueNAS (except for learning it). The real power of this system is to efficiently manage a bunch of physical drives in order to operate in an organized, fast, reliable and effective way. By virtualizing it, we loose many of these advantages, not to mention degrading performances.

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You can virtualize TrueNAS, i have done it on ESXi, VirtualBox, and Hyper V. With that said, the Hyper V version was not very stable and more painful to setup. I am not a Hyper V trained person so i would expect someone trained would be able to answer your question. ESXi and Virtual Box were the easiest to setup a testing environment.

I know this doesn’t answer your question but hopefully it puts some perspective on it.

From the details given here , you are using a bridge network from hyperV. My suggestion would be to start with creating an external switch in hyper-V. If you have a dedicated nic to spare for this vm alone, you can keep it like that , if not, you can set it up to share the nic with base machine.

Yes, I’m currently using bridge network from Hyper V.
I’ll create an external switch with a shared NIC with base machine (another NIC is on its way from Amazon), and I’ll see if its’ works.
Thank you very much !!

Thank you very much for the perspective! I was also looking into ESXi, VirtualBox, and Hyper V, plus Proxmox. ESXI has no freeware license, Virtual box is a type 2 Hypervisor. So eventually I was choosing between Hyper V and Proxmox, but because all my machines are currently Windows based I decided to try out the Hyper V.

I also feel that it’s really unstable and hard to set up. So now I know that when I reinstall TrueNAS I can import previously crated data Pool :slight_smile:

No, Hyper V is a type 1 Hypervisor

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In my server I have 5 HDDs dedicated (and passed through) to True NAS, plus 1 NVMe for VLOG and speed.
Besides that I’m getting a separate PCIe SATA card with 6 SATA ports which I’ll connect my HDDS and NVMe to, and which I’ll also passthrough to TrueNAS in Hyper V. This should work according to what I’ve read, and frankly speaking I don’t see why not virtualize TrueNAS with ZFS for data storage this way.

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That is true, however it is also a Type II when run on Windows, which is where I did run it for evaluation. I thought I heard that running TrueNAS on Hyper V was not well supported, and even ESXi is no longer really supported (sad for me).

Either way, good luck on figuring out the networking issue. I do not have that experience to assist.

and its not working ( I’ve created the External switch (with current NIC), changed the switch setting to External for TrueNAS VM. And as soon as I’ve changed the setting the TrueNAS connection is gone and “host is not found”.
If I delete the external switch from TrueNAS VM settings and delete it from switches everything comes back to normal.
Same with internal switch.

Thanks everyone for your help and support!

I’ve found my answer (that halped) on an old truenas forum. It turns out you have to be tricky with a new static IP

That’s great news…! Finally you got it working.

Also it would be nice, if you could add a reference on the find, or mention in a few lines what needed to be changed, it could help anyone who is interested in future too.

and it stopped working again.
I’ve figured that I need to same net mask for the static IP ( /20 ) same as other devices use in my network. It worked - I changed TrueNAS IP to static, BUT it worked only until I rebooted the host (Hyper V) machine.

This Hyper V machine is driving me nuts.
I’m really considering learning Proxmox … Though I’m not sure I have enough time for that, plus I’ve already invested in Windows license for the host machine.

Not outside of expectations for a Microsoft product, if I may snark…

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What about doing a dhcp reservation for a mac id on your router and leaving it as automatic?

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Right, and that way provide a static IP to the TrueNAS …
Yeah, that might work. I’ll try.

The reason, I move my TrueNAS from bare metal to VM is the following:
I already have 2 servers at home, built from old, but capable Xeon CPUs.
I want to build a nice homelab to testt other applications too.
But, I dont want to build another server just to run all of this separately.
Unfortunately, Truenas, however is a great NAS Appliance, it is rather terrible as a hypervisor.
Also I had really poor luck with its apps.
I also dont like that Ix usually does really fundamental changes from one release to another (dropping VNC support from the hyervisor, dropping Kubernetes as the app host, etc. All this happened in the last 2 years.)
My remote backup server is in a different country, where I have Proxmox as hypervisor, it has two Windows VMs a Linux VM and a TrueNAS VM.
It was way less challenge to install and set it up, and it is realy convenient to use it, and it is rock stable for more than 2 years now.
The built in console/remote desktop works flawlessly, I can always reach it from anywhere in the world (only needed to register a DNS account, since it sits behind a dynamic IP) through a simple web browser, it is quick, low on resources and stable.
I cannot tell yet much about any possible performance drop because of the virtualization, since it is only a remote backup system.
However my main system also will be hardly utilised (even if all 6 of us watches movies).

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Indeed, if one is comfortable with virtualization and have time and skills to do it, this adds a lot of benefits than running on the bare metal.

A few more hidden benefits I can think of this to add are :

  • Power saving by not running anther physical machine and thereby cost. (electricity might not be very cheap everywhere in the world)
  • Having a dedicated physical port and cable to connect for each physical device might not be always an option. (especially for cable routing or availability of spare ports in many home lab scenarios)
  • Physical drives can still be managed, if we can pass through the controllers.
  • Backing up and restoring the VM is a breeze
  • Reverting after an upgrade (if something goes wrong) is much easy with snapshots - ( yes there is an option for boot environment revert for physical, but this is quite simple and confidence level is high by experience)
  • Freedom to move between hardware in case of a physical server (base machine) failure with the least down time.
  • Also the CPU gets a chance to get engaged and not get bored by sitting idle :slight_smile: (most modern CPUs are way more capable of doing things than they are getting assigned currently)