Exploring a New Proxmox Setup to Ditch TrueNAS

[bluepr0]

Hello everyone!

I've been thinking about simplifying my server. Following a recent upgrade (hello NVME drives), I'm thinking about whether to shift away from TrueNAS and manage everything via Proxmox. Let me elaborate.

Currently, I run Proxmox on an NVME drive as the primary disk (local, local-lvm). On this setup, I run several VMs, such as Home Assistant and TrueNAS, alongside a handful of LXC and Docker containers.

For storage management, I utilize the TrueNAS VM, with a PCIe passthrough for 2xNVME drives with a ZFS mirror configuration for the main pool.

Interestingly, I rarely tap into the features of either TrueNAS or ZFS. My current approach involves setting up an NFS share on TrueNAS, which Proxmox mounts, allowing my Docker and LXC access (e.g., for backups, my Nextcloud instance, and more). However, this seems to introduce unnecessary overhead, especially given the speed of my NVME drives and that everything is housed within a single machine.

What I currently use TrueNAS for
(the rest of the apps/services are already running on Proxmox directly)
- Time Machine backups
- Local network folder sharing
- Folder backups to Dropbox
- Folder backups to Backblaze

I'd genuinely appreciate your insights. Is it time to simplify my server infrastructure and move on from TrueNAS? One of the aspects I like about TrueNAS is the seamless integration of backups to Dropbox and Backblaze. If I decide to move away from it, I'll have to find alternative applications offering similar functionality.

Moreover, if you believe moving away from TrueNAS is the right call, could you recommend a filesystem to run Proxmox "storage pool"? My primary concerns are reliability, speed, and the capability to mirror it onto another drive.

Thanks for any input!

 

[Dunuin]

Maybe you should read a bit more about ZFS to be able to better make use of it.
Bit rot protection and block level compression are used by default and super useful.
And snapshots and replication is great for backups. Makes it so much easier with snapshots when you can rollback a file on your SMB shares to a state from a few days ago direcetly from within the windows explorer. And replication makes it so much faster to backup your data, including all the snapshots, to another pool or even another ZFS host.

If you don't care that much about your data integrity and nmore about performance and less write amplification you could try a OpenMediaVault VM with something like xfs on top of mdadm software raid1.

 

[bluepr0]

Maybe you should read a bit more about ZFS to be able to better make use of it.
Bit rot protection and block level compression is used by default and super useful.
And snapshots and replication is great for backups. Makes it so much easier with snapshots when you can rollback a file on your SMB shares to a state from a few days ago direcetly from within the windows explorer. And replication makes it so much faster to backup your data, including all the snapshots, to another pool or even another ZFS host.

If you don't care that much about your data integrity and nmore about performance and less write amplification you could try a OpenMediaVault VM with something like xfs on top of mdadm software raid1.

Hey, thanks for getting back to me. I think I might have not explained well in my last message, so let me break it down again.

I've got nothing against TrueNAS or ZFS – they're pretty cool. But I'm not really using everything they've got to offer. I'm thinking, why not just set up a ZFS pool straight in Proxmox and find some other tools to do what I've been using TrueNAS for?

Here's what I'm using TrueNAS for right now:
- Time Machine backups — I could just use Samba on Proxmox.
- Sharing folders on my local network — Samba should do the trick here too.
- Backing up folders to Dropbox — I'm thinking of running Duplicati or Duplicacy in a Docker on Proxmox.
- Backing up folders to Backblaze — The same idea as Dropbox.

This way, I can skip the whole TrueNAS thing and run everything straight from bare-metal.

What do you think? Any red flags? Cheers again!

 

[Dunuin]

One problem is, that PVE doesn`t offer any NAS functionalities. You can of cause use the CLI to install and setup the SMB server yourself as well as configure all the SMB shares, users and whatever. But then it is very prone to user errors without a webUI/GUI and it is really a pain to get your system running again, the more you customize your PVE installation, in case your system somehow fails.

 

[bluepr0]

One problem is, that PVE doesn`t offer any NAS functionalities. You can of cause use the CLI to install and setup the SMB server yourself as well as configure all the SMB shares, users and whatever. But then it is very prone to user errors without a webUI/GUI and it is really a pain to get your system running again, the more you customize your PVE installation, in case your system somehow fails.

I know I'll need to set up Samba via the terminal, but my feeling is that it shouldn't be that hard?. Once it's set, I can just let it do its thing. I don't tinker with settings too much anyway.

If anyone's curious, I'm thinking of testing it out and can share how it goes. Has anyone else tried it and want to share their thoughts?

 

[bluepr0]

I'm also wondering, maybe it's just a matter to connect TrueNAS with Proxmox in other way rather than NFS? Looks like the speed is really slow considering I have only NVME drives

 

[Dunuin]

There isn't much you can do. You could try iSCSI for less overhead but then this also comes with it's limitations as it is block storage.

 

[bluepr0]

I've been doing some research and it seems there's this "Cockpit" app that could do all of that. So basically you install it on an LXC and have basic sharing functionality, user management, etc. The ZFS pools could be created or imported directly on Proxmox. Here's a video that explains it in detail