Can TrueNAS Scale Replace your Hypervisor?

TrueNAS has always been a great file server, but wasn't built with virtualization support in mind. With TrueNAS Scale, that's about to change.

But first... What am I drinking???

From WellBeing Brewing comes a non-alcoholic Golden Wheat Ale, the Heavenly Body. With only 68 calories, it's definitely a great alternative to grabbing a soda, but I don't think it'll replace beer in my fridge anytime soon.

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Music:
Lobby Time by Kevin MacLeod

[blademan]

Would love to see you compare Truenas Scale vs. Proxmox

[KuroiPK]

Some benchmarking and comparisons would be great. I feel like TrueNAS is nearly there for people that have easier setups

[evolution]

The AHCI Emulation does not limit speeds, it just emulates the storage calls. So, you can go over 6gbps.
Similarly, it is theoretically possible to go over 1Gbps on the Intel e1000 virtual NIC. If you transfer data between VMs, you will probably see it break 1Gbps since the data only goes through server memory.
That said, in most cases VirtIO is faster and has a lower performance penalty.

[Catge]

My favorite channel since I found it months ago! Thanks Jeff

[iamwebmuso]

I installed Scale a week ago for the first time, thanks for the heads up on the VM section, answered a few questions I had. Good work.

[andysdworld]

Very much looking forward to more of your videos on TrueNAS scale! hope there's one covering containerization features next.

[Paulnt]

One correction: Emulated AHCI is not limited to 6Gbps. Early PCIe SSDs were AHCI instead of NVMe. It just introduces the overhead of emulated AHCI storage calls instead of block level access.

[QuentinStephens]

I would like to see a video on clustering, both of data and of VMs.

[DangoNetwork]

Do really want to see a VirtIO video. Especially with windows server 2022. (I think the NIC driver was not compatable last time I tested it.)

For way TrueNAS VM not use dynamic memory, I think it's mostly due to ZFS Cache. Unlike most hypervisor which always have free memory, ZFS will comsume all the memory for caching then VM will need to keep swap shared memory with ZFS that could cause performance issue.

[RambUz]

delightful color setting, my eyes thanks you from my dark bunker

[questionablecommands]

True (mostly (extremely (very)) boring) story: The only reason why I have a homelab is because I decided to build a FreeNAS 10 host because I thought corral looked rad and because I could run most of my workloads in provided Docker support. In the time between me ordering my hardware and receiving my hardware, it was announced that corral would no longer be a thing. Then I realized I ordered LGA2011 v4 CPUs (which I didn't _want_ to return) and a v2 mobo (which I _couldn't_ return) so I did the only logical thing and ordered a v4 mobo and v2 CPUs ... the LGA2011v2 rig ended up being my FreeNAS 11 rig and the v4 a XCP-ng rig, but with TrueNAS Scale, it's looking like I can go back to that original single host dream. Heck! With that GPU passthrough, I can even have a Windows VM I can RDP into so I can continue to pretend to know how to use Fusion 360!

[arubial]

I've never understood the fascination with dynamic memory allocation. I've never had good luck with it, and I subscribe to the old adage "allocate what you need to the VM, no more...no less"

[trumanhw]

Excellent explanation. This was really impressively done. Much higher polish than a year before.

[RichardSwift]

Thanks! And yes to review all the VM options.

Btw I love the beer glass merch, I ordered one last fall.

[NetBandit]

Jeff's beer is a better progress bar than what Windows has.

[charlescc]

Great timing. As Scale comes out of beta I am really intrigued by the idea of combining my Unraid and TrueNAS core server into a single TrueNAS scale server.
Unraid is great but I prefer managing Docker containers via Docker-compose. I use VMs a bit, but mostly to try out different OSes, not to provide a service such as plex

[NickyNiclas]

Tried to set up a Windows VM and I was wondering why the hell it was so (unusably) slow. Turns out it doesn't like AHCI and runs way faster on VirtIO

[ethienne]

Yes doing some more truenas scale VM videos. Comparisons, performance benchmarks, etc!

[paleblue]

I really fucking like your content. The vibe is immaculate and you see me like an IT pro's Techie

[seeman]

Great video! I've been learning about TrueNAS and struggling through the learning process.
I love this kind of video going through some of the finer points of the system!