Running VMs in TrueNAS Scale - Should you run this instead of Proxmox?

It's been a full two years since I last looked at Virtual Machine support in TrueNAS Scale. While I liked what I saw back in the initial review, there were definitely improvements to be made. Two years on, is TrueNAS a Hypervisor you can actually use in your homelab or business?

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Trooper Original, Robinsons Brewery (Cheshire, England) (4.7%)

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[VeronicaExplains]

I ran my homelab rig on Scale for a week. It was the longest month of my life.

I wish them well and hope they can solve it, but I've stuck with Debian+KVM for good reason. Everything just works for me there.

[privateger]

In short: No.

Long: NooOoOOOoOoooOooo!

[greenprotag]

You can pry Proxmox from my cold dead fingers LMAO

[TheJulianJES]

VLAN support for VMs is there since some years. You create a VLAN in the network section and then attach that to the VM in NIC settings. It works fine for me.
noVNC was fully replaced by Spice due to security issues in the VNC protocol, but the usability is still bad. However, using virt-viewer should work much better compared to the web client.
TrueNAS 24.10-RC.2 is already out and the full release of 24.10 will be out by the end of the month. There are multiple fixes in that version. For example:
The Spice VM password is correctly hidden when entering it on 24.10. The 8 length password limitation issue is also resolved.
Also, for the disk latency test, was the virtual disk passed through via AHCI or VirtIO? 24.10 might also improve that, but I haven't tested it. Just a guess.

[sparksnmagic]

I would be really interested if you could retry this experiment with the Electric Eel version of TrueNAS.

[PeterBuffon]

In my opinion, if you run truenas bare metal and run vms in it it's like using an ISP router that is wifi/switch/toaster, in my opinion you only run truenas for a NAS software. And a hypervisor as a hypervisor.And you can run truenas as a VM too.

[keyem]

I am running 2 Proxmox machines and was looking for a way to run a Proxmox Backup Server and a NAS. When I got an older Server for free I decided to run TrueNas bare metal and virtualize PBS on top of it, since the NAS performance was more critical to me than that of the backup server.
It works, but TrueNas is nowhere near Proxmox as a Hypervisor. I felt restricted in a lot of things I wanted to do.
So, for me Proxmox is my go-to for hypervisors and TrueNas Scale my favorite NAS solution. Both great in their area of expertise but no competition for each other.

[kk]

So.. time for a new and updated Proxmox guide? :)
EDIT: It should be noted that i am a huge fan of Jeffs guides, i have spend many hours learning and installing stuff, that i don't really need, but just for the sake of it. I mean, nerdy and all.
But it's been a while since he took our hand and walked us through a complete Proxmox guide, with window install, Truenas Setup, GPU pass-through on a consumer card, backup etc etc..

Yeah i know, months of content/work.. sorry Jeff

[Momi_V]

I've been running TrueNas Scale as my sole Homeserver/NAS/Hypervisor for over half a year now. It has worked perfectly fine for running a Reverse Proxy VM, my Nextcloud VM (+ related services), a VM for Jellyfin and Handbrake (with GPU passthrough) along with the occasional Test VM for random stuff i come across.
I've standardized on OpenSUSE MicroOS (which is extremely easy to provision in a wide variety of different hosting environments) and the only thing I found lacking were the janky VM Display viewer and Snapshots not including the VM configuration.
I tested both Proxmox and XCP-ng for about 6 months each before (and even some more exotic solutions like a Hyperconverged Ceph cluster based on RHEL derivatives) and switched over to Scale, because I just didn't need the extra features. For me the better functionality and UI for handeling Storage (Block device and ZFS options), User management and Share Permissions along with the Performance and Efficiency increase, as well as the complexity decrease of not messing around with a virtualized NAS appliance was worth the usability tradeoff in the Virtualization department.

[kenzieduckmoo]

"Trying to outsmart the room" is the modus operandi of this entire channel :P

[motmontheinternet]

You finding bugs in TrueNAS is just normal. I've never been able to use TrueNAS's GUI for an afternoon without running into something showstopping. It's also confusing because they explicitly recommend you use the GUI and not the console.

[Karakofirespartan]

@level1tech I summon thee


Edit: I just grabbed the BD790i SE can't wait to build with it. The SE slightly cut down version of the regular board.

[lolish]

I've been using it temporarily but once you are used to all the features/functions of esx/proxmox then this feels like stone age :D
Better to run truenas as a vm with hdd passthrough and having a proper hypervisor.

[mikehathaway]

I never used truenas as a hypervisor until I last year when I really needed Proxmox backup running on one of our nas's (at work believe it or not). I setup a VM with bhyve on truenas core for proxmox backup. It has been running solid without issues for close to a year. I also ran an ubuntu VM in bhyve on core to host docker worked great for a couple years never an issue. I have an issue with Craft (and a lot of other YouTubers in the space) whenever they start looking at running VM's the first thing they want to do is route a physical GPU, then run into issues because GPU's and hypervisors across the board just have issues. After they have issues they report that its not ready for prime time. When in reality Proxmox, VMware, TrueNAS and just about everything else has support for GPU passthrough but across the board they are all a roll of the dice. If you are doing anything that does not require screwing around with hardware GPU passthrough Truenas CORE and Scale work quite well. They are not up there with proxmox but they are also not far behind.

[mrgwei]

All of these problems are exactly why im keeping truenas strictly as a NAS and switching all hypervisor tasks over to proxmox.

[THEMithrandir]

Honestly, I'll never run anything except purely ephemeral workloads on trueNAS ever since an update wiped everyones data. Sure, we had backups, but this kind of breach of trust takes over 10 years to earn back in my book.

[likwidflame]

TrueNAS for storage, hosting Proxmox as a VM, hosting all services on SSD with pinned CPU threads in TrueNAS. Seems to be fine, but I know I could use some different hardware to push the limits.

[david_sanchez]

Hey Jeff. Great video, as usual! I figured I'd chime in with my thoughts. Albeit, in a personal-use/small software dev env.

TrueNAS's virtualization really is clunky. It's not refined and can be confusing with how some things are implemented (i.e. over-provisioning memory & such). I've also experienced most of the things you mention in the video. However, I really only run Linux virtuals to simulate a fail-safe database environment for software development purposes. That being said, VNC really isn't a thing for me. It's all pretty much SSH and if I need direct console access, I just use the Serial Shell utility in the VM's drop-down. I also haven't experienced too much gripe with GPU pass-through. The steps to set that up aren't very intuitive but once you do it, it's done. I can say that once you do get it all working and it's doing its thing, you really don't ever have to touch it again. This isn't to say that "it just works" because it really is finicky but, I haven't had any issues with it since I initially set it up.

All this to say...
TrueNAS is storage-centric. Proxmox is virtualization-centric. If TrueNAS wants to realistically compete with Proxmox's hypervisor capabilities and features, iX would most likely need to release a product with virtualization as its core. When people ask me about this type of stuff I tell them the same thing you mentioned in the video, choose the technologies you need to accomplish your goals. I'm a true believer that a storage solution should be a storage solution and a compute solution should be a compute solution. Mix-n-match to fit your use case.

[montecorbit]

You tested TrueNAS's VM and found it lacking. I have been told that ProxMox can do NAS. Do you plan on doing a video for that, or have you already done that recently? It seems like it would be a good compliment to this video....

Thank you for the video, and thank you for your time.

[nickspacemonkey]

I've found myself not using a VM these days. The jailmaker script works really well for making systemd-nspawn containers and you can choose from a pretty good list of LXC images.