This is a fairly common setup and it’s not too complex - learning more about Proxmox and TrueNAS/ZFS individually will probably be easiest.
Usually:
Proxmox on bare metal
TrueNAS Core/Scale in a VM
Pass the HBA PCI card through to TrueNAS and set up your ZFS pool there
If you run your app stack through Docker, set up a minimal Debian/Alpine host VM (you can technically use Docker under an LXC but experienced people keep saying it causes problems eventually and I’ll take their word for it)
If you run your app stack through LXCs, just set them up through Proxmox normally
Set up an NFS share through TrueNAS, and connect your app stack to that NFS share
(Optional): Just run your ZFS pool on Proxmox itself and skip TrueNAS
I already run proxmox but not TrueNAS. I’m really just confused about the HBA card. Probably a stupid question but why can’t TrueNAS access regular drives connected to SATA?
The main problem is just getting TrueNAS access to the physical disks via IOMMU groups and passthrough. HBA cards are a super easy way to get a dedicated IOMMU group that has all your drives attached, so it’s common for people to use them in these sorts of setups. If you can pull your normal SATA controller down into the TrueNAS VM without messing anything else up on the host layer, it will work the same way as an HBA card for all TrueNAS cares.
(TMK, SATA controller hubs are usually an all-at-once passthrough, so if you have your host system running off some part of this controller it probably won’t work to unhook it from the host and give it to the guest.)
So theoretically if someone has alrady set up their NAS (custom Debian with ZFS root instead of TrueNAS, but shouldn’t matter), it sounds like it should be relatively straightforward to migrate all of that into a Proxmox VM, by installing Proxmox “under it”, right? Only thing I’d need right now is some SSD for Proxmox itself.
Proxmox would be the host on bare metal, with your current install as a VM under that. I’m not sure how to migrate an existing real install into a VM so it might require backing up configs and reinstalling.
You shouldn’t need any extra hardware in theory, as Proxmox will let you split up the space on a drive to give to guest VMs.
(I’m probably misunderstanding what you’re trying to do?)
I just thought that if all storage can easily be “passed through” to a VM then it should in theory be very simple to boot the existing installation in a VM directly.
Regarding the extra storage: sharing disk space between proxmox and my current installation would imply that I have to pass-through “half of a drive” which I don’t think works like that. Also, I’m using ZFS for my OS disk and I don’t feel comformtable trying to figure out if I can easily resize those partitions without breaking anything ;-)
This is 100% my experience and setup. (Though I run Debian for my docker VM)
I did run docker in an LXC but ran into some weird permission issues that shouldn’t have existed. Ran it again in VM and no issues with the same setup. Decided to keep it that way.
I do run my plex and jellyfin on an LXC tough. No issues with that so far.
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This is a fairly common setup and it’s not too complex - learning more about Proxmox and TrueNAS/ZFS individually will probably be easiest.
Usually:
Proxmox on bare metal
TrueNAS Core/Scale in a VM
Pass the HBA PCI card through to TrueNAS and set up your ZFS pool there
If you run your app stack through Docker, set up a minimal Debian/Alpine host VM (you can technically use Docker under an LXC but experienced people keep saying it causes problems eventually and I’ll take their word for it)
If you run your app stack through LXCs, just set them up through Proxmox normally
Set up an NFS share through TrueNAS, and connect your app stack to that NFS share
(Optional): Just run your ZFS pool on Proxmox itself and skip TrueNAS
I already run proxmox but not TrueNAS. I’m really just confused about the HBA card. Probably a stupid question but why can’t TrueNAS access regular drives connected to SATA?
The main problem is just getting TrueNAS access to the physical disks via IOMMU groups and passthrough. HBA cards are a super easy way to get a dedicated IOMMU group that has all your drives attached, so it’s common for people to use them in these sorts of setups. If you can pull your normal SATA controller down into the TrueNAS VM without messing anything else up on the host layer, it will work the same way as an HBA card for all TrueNAS cares.
(TMK, SATA controller hubs are usually an all-at-once passthrough, so if you have your host system running off some part of this controller it probably won’t work to unhook it from the host and give it to the guest.)
Makes sense, thanks for the info
That was one of the things I got wrong at first as well. But it totally makes it much easier in the long run.
So theoretically if someone has alrady set up their NAS (custom Debian with ZFS root instead of TrueNAS, but shouldn’t matter), it sounds like it should be relatively straightforward to migrate all of that into a Proxmox VM, by installing Proxmox “under it”, right? Only thing I’d need right now is some SSD for Proxmox itself.
Proxmox would be the host on bare metal, with your current install as a VM under that. I’m not sure how to migrate an existing real install into a VM so it might require backing up configs and reinstalling.
You shouldn’t need any extra hardware in theory, as Proxmox will let you split up the space on a drive to give to guest VMs.
(I’m probably misunderstanding what you’re trying to do?)
I just thought that if all storage can easily be “passed through” to a VM then it should in theory be very simple to boot the existing installation in a VM directly.
Regarding the extra storage: sharing disk space between proxmox and my current installation would imply that I have to pass-through “half of a drive” which I don’t think works like that. Also, I’m using ZFS for my OS disk and I don’t feel comformtable trying to figure out if I can easily resize those partitions without breaking anything ;-)
That should work, but I don’t have experience with it. In that case yeah you’d need another separate drive to store Proxmox on.
This is 100% my experience and setup. (Though I run Debian for my docker VM)
I did run docker in an LXC but ran into some weird permission issues that shouldn’t have existed. Ran it again in VM and no issues with the same setup. Decided to keep it that way.
I do run my plex and jellyfin on an LXC tough. No issues with that so far.