How to run TrueNAS on Proxmox?

The question is not HOW do I run TrueNAS as a VM under ProxMox. The question should be why would you want to? Other than file store services, TrueNAS does nothing that ProxMox doesn't do better. But wait. You can run a fileserver in a container in ProxMox. The storage devices in that container can use ZFS. If you want media services you can easily run Jellyfin in that same container serving content off your ZFS file store. And that file store can easily be shared out to your Windows, Linux and Mac machines on your network.

This is exactly what I have setup. A ZFS fileseve/JellyFin server and it runs in a mere 600Mb of RAM (excluding ZFS cache). On a low power Intel N305 CPU it idles at .16% usage and with two Jellyfin clients and several simultaneous file transfers I've yet to see CPU rise past 35%.

I love TrueNAS and I love ProxMox but when I found out how light a touch I could replace TrueNAS with, well for now I'm done with TrueNAS.

Hello Christian, thanks again for your great content. Quick question, could you tell me what kind of terminal you re using? I kind of like the look of the interface...
Thank you again

what i really didn't like and recommend - it to virtualize core infrastructure elements like NAS. Despite for someone it could sound like good idea, on practice - if the virtualization server fails (hardware or software) - would fail everything on it. Same for workloads, NAS would use shared cores - and even if the cores would be pinned - the L1, L2, L3 cache is shared - thus would impact the nas performance. And i'm not quite see any benefits in virtualizing it - just get some mini-itx arm based pc, several jbods and several pci sas hba controllers - done. You can build SSD/HDD/M2 or mixed configurations, no problem

Followed this. Worked like a charm.

I'm just trying to figure out...why?

bist du deutscher ?

I like this vid. Good insight.

love the honesty and dedication man, keep going :)

Does the hard drive you pass through have to only be used by Truenas? As an example, I have a large hard drive that has files for home assistant and Jellyfin on it. Do I need to move those to another hard drive before passing it through to Truenas?

Hi Christian and everyone, with the passthrough of the disks to Truenas, do you have the SMART tests working? I can't see any tests results and even if I try a manual run, I got an error message "Short offline self test failed [unsupported scsi opcode]", does not matter the type of test selected.

You're just an amazing mentor! Thanks for all the knowledge, much appreciated

One little thing (and I've been seeing this in a lot of similar tutorials), but "SCSI" is pronounced "Scuzzy". Probably not something that comes up a lot if you didn't work in enterprise storage in the 90s, so I'm not surprised that nobody else has mentioned it

Thank you! This was a great video!

let's say that i've setup a truenas/freenas or unraid within a vm. and i want this nas to use my to 2 harddrives in raid 1. would that be possible?

I do not know when this happened, but now my internal SATA controller is in a seperate IOMMU group.
I seem to be able to pass through just fine without having to resort to the work around.

Anyone else find this?

I loved that you showed how to do it without pcie passthrough, every tutorial did pcie which wouldnt work for my setup! Thank you so much!!

currently im running a ITX Server with 16x LSI in a similar config, DMZ, 10G, LAN, Truenas Core VM on Server 2019 and passing the LSI to the VM. Im thinking about switching to proxmox due to ur videos or... stick with installing Truenas Scale as main OS on the server. It has 2x2TB SSD Raid 1 which is used for all kind of VMs for now, but i wonder if this fits fine for Truenas Scale and how the virtualization is on that. 2TB would be massive waste for Truenas only. Most VMs i currently use are fine in Scale with Apps, Plex, Nextcloud, but sometimes app dont fit and therefore virtualiszation would be ideal. thus i never worked with proxmox and i think truenas scale as main OS should be quite capable on Vms too + cloudflare tunnels for all of the apps to be accessible

How do you install the qemu-guest,-agent on the TrueNAS Core VM?

Now, there is a confusing topic to me, which is File system, you mentioned that truenas(core) had its own software raid, proxmox uses a software raid aswell, but what about the hardware raid card in a server how to configure it correctly then?

Don't use ZFS on consumer SSDs... In that case avoid ZFS.

Would be really cool if you could do a video about importing existing pools from other NAS' such as QNAP and Synology into TrueNAS. Totally not asking because that's what I need to figure out since my QNAP kicked the bucket or anything...

Can you use TrueNAS core as a shared storage server for your vm's end containers on proxmox? mount it by nfs or iscsi end a separed server as proxmox virtualization server? i have 2 hp proliant servers? HP ml350 g6 treunas server end Hp dl360p g8 with 172 gb ram proxmox server?

is this work on raid 5 server ?

there is Linux command: blkid

champion, excellent guide as always

Hallo Christan, sobald ich meinen HBA Controller durchreiche bootet TrueNAS nicht mehr, selbst beim manuellen auswählen des TrueNAS Boot HDD im SeaBIOS. Problem mit der Methode einzeln durchzureichen SMART TESTS funktionieren nicht. :( Wäre cool wenn du ein Video dazu machen könntest.

Weitere infos: Bei kommt beim Booten mit HBA immer der Fehler "this harddrive is only a truenas data partition" oder so ähnlich, aber ohne HBA funktioniert es. Die bootreihenfolge ändern oder deaktivieren von Geräten unter options in der vm hat auch nichts gebracht.

What is betterwith for Trunas on Proxmox? Pass through disk, pass through sata controller or just do do that and use virtual disks?

Always go HBA over PCI SATA expansion which are junk. And you don't need to spend hundreds on a new HBA card, just buy one second hand, super easy to find a DELL H200 or similar online for under $50.

is there chance to have drive (just for data) where will be files and if something happen with proxmox that i can unplug it and directly to connect it to my laptop and i will see all? thanks

Ok so I have truenas on baremetal then decided to do via proxmox last month.

After a while I skipped adding apps in truenas and left it only for shares smb and app made into proxmox mostly lxc so far so good, however my only issue

Truenas doesnt see the cpu temperature from cpu. Can any one share how did they fix that

i just need to run samba container in proxmox with 512mb ram

I just wanna say THANK YOU! This video is the only one that explains how to add a hard disk not the card itself. It can be not elegant but for me that don´t have a card and it´s hard to get one in affordable price (i live in Brazil) works perfect! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

If you have problems on truenas that it cannot identify unique disks, use sata insteads of scsi: qm set 103 -sata1 /dev/disk/by-id/...

what is the outcome in relative terms when comparing no passthrough vs passthrough?

Any reason to still go for TrueNAS CORE instead of SCALE?

For me I used OVMF (UEFI) BIOS, TPM module, UEFI during installation, and then specify serial number for TrueNAS so it doesn't complain, optionally disabling backup as TrueNAS can handle it itself e.g. "qm set 101 -scsi1 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-SOMETHING_WCJ5ADA,backup=0,serial=WCJ5ADA" Not that UI will still show name like da1 but don't worry, if you go do details there is "serial" visible and truenas won't show notification message complaining anymore

ddr5 has on die ecc

I know this comment is very late but not all motherboards have SATA as something you cannot passthrough, some boards show their sata controller as PCIe devices/chipset and allow you to passthrough them to said VMs (works for me, however it doesn't mean that It'll work for everyone)

Exactly what I was looking for!

Is ECC Ram really needed when only using 1 HDD with TrueNAS? I'd like to get the snapshot and deduplication capability but i unfortunately don't have an ECC compatible System.

Excellent video. Thanks for elaborating on how to set up the physical drives independently with the Truenas VM. Personally, I would instead use RaidZ and have TrueNas control the RAID System rather than having to use a controller to manage the hard drives. I'm sure you would sacrifice a little performance. However, everyone's use case can be different.

I like these videos, but they'd be way more useful if you said more about the "why" behind the procedures. Yes, it's possible to virtualize TrueNAS, and you've done a great job of telling us how to do it. But what, if anything do we actually gain by doing this? What's the reason? ....because you can? It seems that the more roles / VMs / functions are added to a single physical machine, the more exposed it becomes in the event of hardware failure. If my production server, NAS, gaming rig, etc., are all in the same machine, when something goes physically wrong, instead of just losing one, I lose all. Of course, if the point is just to use the platform as a learning tool, that makes total sense, and it's probably a great idea to have one or more 'disposable' machines laying around for practice and learning. Great tutorials. Thanks!

i attached the hdds to the scsi controller and i can view them in the proxmox gui but when in truenas it gives me a warning about non-unique serial numbers and the serial field is blank for all drives despite showing up in proxmox

Thank you. I've been struggling to make this work for a couple of days. It works now.

I'd love to see a solution that takes an old outdated dedicated NAS, connects it to a Pi running the NAS appliance and then gives you a (new) webgui+SSH+updates for the physically old Nas. :)

I'm curious why you are logged in as 'root'; is it required or only for demonstration purposes??

Why have background music in a video like this. Annoying and stupid.

Thanks, You helped my a lot

Was the reason to pass through the HD vs just allocating a pool of space from proxmox for the storage?

I've been tempted by TrueNAS, but I already have an existing folder structure on my external drives that I don't want to lose.

I ended up just mounting the external drive on my pve host and pointing SAMBA at it.