TrueNAS and PBS VM in one system. Best way to configure?

Dec 8, 2022
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I'm going to do my best to keep this post somewhat short. I'm in the process of setting up an offsite backup for my home TrueNAS and PBS servers. Both are bare metal. I've acquired the base machine and case. It's an supermicro itx board with 1xNVMe slot and a 16xPCIe Slot. Case has room for two internal SSDs and 4xHot Swap 3.5" Bays up front. My current thinking is the following:

  • Install a SATA controller in the NVMe slot. This gives me 2 total counting the one built into the board.
  • Install 4 NVMe drives in a PCIe card that supports the boards x4x4x4x4 bifurcation.
  • Pass one SATA controller to the TrueNAS VM and the other to the PBS VM.
  • Connect two hot swap bays to TrueNAS and the other two to the PBS VM.
  • Install Proxmox to one NVMe drive (not ZFS formatted).
  • Create a mirrored pool from 2xNVMe drives for VM storage.
  • Pass the fourth NVMe to the TrueNAS VM for it's OS.
In my mind this solves the issue of not having a ZFS filesystem inside a ZFS filesystem by passing a disk to TrueNAS for the OS directly. I know it's still a QEMU device but should be okay for the OS. I could make this an LVM VM storage inside Proxmox and install the TrueNAS VM the traditional way like that.

Both VMs get direct access to HDDs through control of the SATA controllers. I know PBS isn't recommended to be on spinning drives, but this will be a replication location for my main PBS to replicate to, and not where my actual VMs will be backing up to. If this is still an issue let me know, I have those two internal SSD slots of could even place them in the hot swap bays.

I will likely install a docker VM and a wireguard VM as well on this system.

Changes I could make here would be to use an NFS share from the TrueNAS VM for the PBS VM datastore. Or I could pass the drives to the PBS VM, but through Proxmox, instead of passing it a SATA controller. Not sure how much PBS cares about that. I know for TrueNAS it's definitely best practice.

Thoughts? I feel I've overcomplicated this and there are likely bad ideas and practices I've come up with.
 

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