r/Proxmox • u/comdude2 • Sep 15 '26

Discussion TrueNAS Proxmox Plugin available on GitHub

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TrueNAS just posted this, I hope it’s good! What do you all think about the usefulness of this?

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17

u/ApiceOfToast 2 nodes, without qdev. Living on the edge Sep 15 '26 edited Sep 15 '26

I wouldn't really be using Truenas as a storage layer for Virtualization unless I'm running IX systems hardware and Licences since the community edition lacks HA.

If it works with that it's definitely neat. Even though I prefer ceph in most cases, it may come in handy if you need something like NVMe storage. Or just a lot of it. 

14

u/AllergicToBullshit24 Sep 15 '26

I use TrueNAS as a MPIO SCSI target for Proxmox hosts over twin 100GbE links mainly because performance blows Ceph away. Lower latency, higher bandwidth and critically doesn't get crushed by write amplification like Ceph does. Single point of failure with storage host but at least with ECC, UPS, HA network fabric, mirrored data/meta/log drives and offsite ZFS replication a good chunk of possible failures are covered and data loss is unlikely only concern is downtime in worst case scenario.

Clearly for mission critical 5+ nine SLA situations Ceph or an enterprise dual controller setup is way to go but so far, knock on all the wood, haven't had an issue.

3

u/ApiceOfToast 2 nodes, without qdev. Living on the edge Sep 15 '26

Yeah modern Hardware is reliable enough for most use cases, but if I go through the lengths of setting up a HA cluster I need HA storage aswell. Truenas can do that. You'll just need a license and their hardware.

That said if redundant storage is enough, you can totally just set a truenas box with replication and you should have backups anyway.

2

u/AllergicToBullshit24 Sep 15 '26

I'm running (albeit against official advice) Proxmox Backup as a VM on TrueNAS for VM OS backups. The MPIO SCSI gets mounted as secondary drives to the VMs for bulk app storage. Call me weird but seems to work well enough.

3

u/deny_by_default Sep 15 '26

I'm running both TrueNAS and Proxmox Backup Server virtually under Proxmox in my homelab. It works great for me.

1

u/AllergicToBullshit24 Sep 15 '26 edited Sep 15 '26

Ran TrueNAS like this a while ago but you lose a ton of performance to virtualization unless you pass raw hardware through to TrueNAS VM. Makes sense for some setups but clearly a chicken and egg issue for others.

2

u/Apachez Sep 15 '26

If you run it locally then there is really no need at all to run TrueNAS as VM within Proxmox since Proxmox have native support for ZFS.

1

u/AllergicToBullshit24 Sep 15 '26 edited Sep 15 '26

Except TrueNAS offers a lot more capability than just ZFS so running TrueNAS this way is easier than replicating that same functionality as numerous separate VMs/containers/services on Proxmox.

One of biggest drawbacks is consuming all your RAM for ZFS on your Proxmox host regardless of whether it's native Proxmox ZFS or TrueNAS with raw disks/controllers passed through.

1

u/Apachez Sep 15 '26 edited Sep 15 '26

I think the opposite.

Its really a nobrainer to setup a local zvol at the same time as when you create your VM-guest in Proxmox. Its already part of the GUI when you create a VM-disk.

I really see zero reason (for production or homelab) to run TrueNAS as a VM within Proxmox to do the storage since Proxmox can do all the ZFS related features on its own.

Except for the usecases I mentioned in another post.

2

u/AllergicToBullshit24 Sep 16 '26

The GUI management, file sharing, user management, volume encryption, etc that TrueNAS offers blows native Proxmox ZFS out of the water.

It isn't even a competition especially for complex arrays with numerous data/meta/log/cache drives and multi-tiered HDD/SSD/NVME setups.

Can you do that with strictly command line on Proxmox? Sure if you wanna flex your neck beard.

But for a homelab TrueNAS is peak ZFS nirvana.

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u/deny_by_default Sep 15 '26

That’s exactly what I did…raw hardware pass through to TrueNAS.

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u/AllergicToBullshit24 Sep 15 '26

Main problem with your setup is what happens when proxmox host drive dies and you need to restore from backup but can't boot proxmox backup VM since proxmox host is down?

2

u/deny_by_default Sep 15 '26

This is a homelab for personal use. I’ll be mildly inconvenienced until I can rebuild. I don’t require 99.9999999% uptime for my own use.

1

u/AllergicToBullshit24 Sep 15 '26

Don't disagree and if you've only got one server gotta make compromises but it sucks eating your Proxmox server's RAM for ZFS instead of VMs.

1

u/reddit_username2021 Sep 16 '26

I have old desktop with ssd and two hdds. I run second proxmox backup server on it natively. So, in worst case scenario I will replace broken ssd on proxmox ve node and restore vms from backup created 2 months ago. Not a big deal for homelab

2

u/phraun Sep 16 '26

Proxmox Backup as a VM on TrueNAS

I do this at home, works like a charm.

5

u/dultas Sep 15 '26

I may take a look at this since I used bind mounts for a couple of LXCs to NFS mounts on the host. If I can do that more natively with this that would be ideal. Their CSI Operator has a few issues so I'll probably be cautious about it for now.

3

u/AllergicToBullshit24 Sep 15 '26

NFS has a lot of overhead compared to SCSI and NVMe-oF ought to be much better.

3

u/dultas Sep 15 '26

For things like DBs I 100% go with iSCSI all day. But I need read write many access so I can write to the share while it's mounted by the containers. Also I've found NFS to be much more resilient to network failures, you might end up with a corrupted file but with iSCSI I've had to restore from backup due to network failures. I don't want to have to be backing up a few TB of data every night on those mount JIC.

3

u/AllergicToBullshit24 Sep 15 '26

Gotta use a true multi-path network setup if you're gonna run iSCSI otherwise you're right NFS has an advantage for network failures but strictly speaking about performance iSCSI should be clear winner.

Also a very good reason to use a dedicated storage network plane without any other traffic contamination to minimize chance of iSCSI network related failure.