Proxmox VE and TrueNAS Connectivity Question

[Tyler 123]

Hello,
I'm struggling to understand the physical connectivity on how to make this work within ProxMox
I am getting hung up on having two separate devices and how they will communicate properly.
Currently I have a home built PC that I am using as my dedicated ProxMox server. From there, I have a 2u rack mount case with multiple hard drives in it, ram, CPU, motherboard etc. to make up that box.
If I install a TrueNAS VM on ProxMox, how exactly does ProxMox itself see or communicate with another piece of equipment or server? Addtionally, is it possible to use the resources within the 2u server to run TrueNAS. Or in this case would it be better all together to not even use a VM within ProxMox for TrueNAS and stand up a standalone box.
I've researched the HBA Controllers and that makes total sense to me if I was going to have 1 single piece of equipment and multiple drives to separate my ProxMox storage from my TrueNAS Storage.
Anyways, I'm just confused on this one. I've seen many videos with people having a ProxMox PC setup and a separate rackmount storage setup and integrated with the ProxMox, i just don't understand how they're physically and virtually getting them connected. I do have a Cisco layer 3 switch and am currently virtualizing PFSense for my Vlans and DHCP.

I'm sure I missed some key details that would make this easier to understand.
Thank you in advance!

 

[Dunuin]

Many people (including me) run a dedicated TrueNAS fileserver which provides network storage to the PVE server via NFS/SMB/iSCSI. There are also disc shelves (basically just a fancy external drive enclosure ) where you connect it to another server using NVMe-over-Fibre or external SAS cables to connect the backplanes to a server in the rack.

 

[Tyler 123]

Many people (including me) run a dedicated TrueNAS fileserver which provides network storage to the PVE server via NFS/SMB/iSCSI. There are also disc shelves (basically just a fancy external drive enclosure ) where you connect it to another server using NVMe-over-Fibre or external SAS cables to connect the backplanes to a server in the rack.

Thank you for the reply!
So just to be sure I understand, I have my 2u hard drive enclosure that I will install TruNAS on it completely and configure it, etc. From there, I would get this connected to my network then just go into the "Datacenter" Portion of ProxMox > Storage > Add new NFS then link it to the IP I assigned on my dedciated TrueNAS Server
By doing this, my TrueNAS Server would not actually be a virtualized VM with ProxMox, as I will be configuring this all on a standalone box. Is that correct to how you have yours setup?

 

[Dunuin]

Thank you for the reply!
So just to be sure I understand, I have my 2u hard drive enclosure that I will install TruNAS on it completely and configure it, etc. From there, I would get this connected to my network then just go into the "Datacenter" Portion of ProxMox > Storage > Add new NFS then link it to the IP I assigned on my dedciated TrueNAS Server
By doing this, my TrueNAS Server would not actually be a virtualized VM with ProxMox, as I will be configuring this all on a standalone box. Is that correct to how you have yours setup?

Jup. If you really want you also could install PVE to both servers and then virtualize TrueNAS on the server with all die disks. That got some benefits like that you could also run a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) on that server to backup your guests on the main hypervisor server. And in case your main hypervisor server won't boot because of a hardware problem you could temporarily restore your most imporant VMs on that fileserver from backups too. Always good to have some redundancy, especially if it comes for free.

 

[Tyler 123]

Jup. If you really want you also could install PVE to both servers and then virtualize TrueNAS on the server with all die disks. That got some benefits like that you could also run a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) on that server to backup your guests on the main hypervisor server. And in case your main hypervisor server won't boot because of a hardware problem you could temporarily restore your most imporant VMs on that fileserver from backups too. Always good to have some redundancy, especially if it comes for free.

Ah, genius. I love this idea. that's definitely what i'm going to do then. Thank you for your help!!