Hi. I'm new to Proxmox and this is my first post. I'm considering virtualizing TrueNAS Scale in Proxmox. But, one thing I don't understand is whether passing through harddrives for TrueNAS to use is needed or if using the ZFS drive setup that I have already with Proxmox can be used, thus TrueNAS would use a virtual hard drive. If the drives in Proxmox are setup with a ZFS RAID and TrueNAS uses a single virtual disk that resides on this, wouldn't that be alright? Or, is there something I'm missing?
TrueNAS on Proxmox - is passthrough to HDs needed?
- Thread starter icdit
- Start date
Will work but ZFS got terrible overhead and overhead is multiplying and not just adding up. So ZFS on top of ZFS is a bad idea and I personally wouldn't do that. Would only make sense if you want to migrate that VM between nodes where you wouldn't want to have hardware dependencies.
Otherwise I would get a dedicated HBA + dedicated disks just for TrueNAS and PCI passthrough [1] the whole HBA with all disks attached to it. Or if an HBA + PCI passthrough isn't an option at least dedicated disks with disk passthrough [2].
[1]: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI_Passthrough
[2]: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Passthrough_Physical_Disk_to_Virtual_Machine_(VM)
Last edited:
There is virtualization overhead, as your TrueNAS VM then still is only working with virtual disks that are mapped to physical disks, instead of direct access to the real physical disks you would get with PCI passthrough, but the overhead is quite small. Its more about stuff like that TrueNAS can't monitor disk health (as a virtual disk got no SMART), that the disk will be reported as 512B/512B physical/logical sectors even if your physical disk is actually 512B/4K or even 4K/4K. And when a disk is failing your TrueNAS VM will refuse to start (even if TrueNAS itself could run totally fine when for example a single disk of a raidz2 pool would be missing) as PVE can't start a VM with missing hardware. You then would need to remove the disk passtrough for he failed disk first. And TrueNAS can't spindown the physical disks when only working with virtual disks.
Last edited:
