2 Starter questions (first time truenas / proxmox user)

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

I have two fundamental questions to help me get started on my build. I have 20 years background in IT/Infosec but have no experience with zfs/truenas/proxmox. My hope is that you can help me avoid some rework by making some basic setup mistakes.

First question: I have a server (34 core / 512gb ram) with 18 drive bays. My plan is to run truenas scale on it. Is it recommended to have 8 drives set aside for storage (8x18tb) in one pool. 8 additional SSDs (1tb) set aside and a separate pool for VM/Dockers. Remaining 2 drives for Truenas OS (raid1). I realizes this may seem a simple and silly question, but just wanting to make sure 2 pools, with two different drive types and sizes isn’t a bad idea. Googling seems to find lots of confusing forum threads which don’t directly map to my simple question.

Second Question: I have another server that I am considering using to learn and play with proxmox. If my VM needs are rather simple, should I plan to put anything I plan to use very long term on the Truenas box (above) since it seems migrating from Proxmox to Truenas isn’t easy? The second server is rather old and likely going to be expensive to run long term. I’d like to avoid lots of rework porting my Vm from the “learning” server over to the main server later.

2

  1. Sizes - the only thing that will happen is if you have a mix of sizes in a single pool, it will only provision the lowest size in the pool. So if you had 3 2TB drives and 1 1TB in a raid 0 for example then it would only provision every drive at 1TB. Types - I would keep HDDs and SSD separate in their own pools.

  2. In my opinion I think running VMs on truenas is an “ok” experience but I personally wouldn’t run something you would consider production in a VM on truenas. You mentioned containers, so if you want to run production containers in truenas scale then that might be a viable option depending on the flexibility you will need for your production environment, like networking and segregating things out.

1 Like
3

I agree, separate pools. One for the 8x18tb and another for the 8x1TB SSDs. The TrueNAS Scale virtualization is very basic compared to Proxmox or XCP-NG, workable, but very basic.

1 Like