I’m in the process of migrating my system to some new hardware. I was curious on everyone’s thoughts about Proxmox vs. TrueNAS Scale.
Here is some background - I’m currently running a mini-computer, with Debian, attached to an external hard drive. I host Plex, -arr suite, PhotoPrism/Photo backup space, Syncthing and some other apps. It runs fine, but could probably use some more memory. I also haven’t had a lot of luck backing up all my family’s data (on and off different cloud services) in one place in a way that avoids duplicates. My 4TB HDD is at about 80% full now. I have an offsite synology that I back up to using Syncthing. Syncthing has been having some problems lately, so I’m looking at some other options for that too.
I’ve been wanting to move my storage to an internal HDD, so I bought a larger used computer and a hard drive so that I can clean my setup a bit. It has an i3 8100, 500GB M2, 256 SSD, 8TB HDD and 24GB ram. To experiment, I’ve been running Proxmox and set up a few VMs including TrueNAS.
Proxmox has been pretty amazing. I thought I would have a TrueNAS VM, my Debian-based Plex/-arr VM, and then another Debian vm where I could just test different software that I wanted to host. I haven’t really experimented with the LXMs yet.
I started testing out TrueNAS and saw that it also offers virtualization. If so, I probably wouldn’t need Proxmox for my purposes.
With all that, here are some questions -
- What do you think about Proxmox vs. TrueNAS? Any reason to prefer one over the other?
- What do you think about having a Debian VM to host my Plex and -arr suite? What are the pros and cons of that method vs. hosting the apps on my TrueNAS or Proxmox as containers? I think mainly it would just be portability and isolation.
- Currently, my external HDD is formatted so you could also plug it into Windows and read the contents. If something happens to me, I would like my family to be able to easily access the data. I need to figure out a good way to ensure it is easily accessible to them.
Thanks in advance!
Edit for posterity: after this post, I tried TrueNas, but was annoyed because the HDD was constantly being accessed. I tried unRAID after that, but had a similar problem with HDD access noise. I tried several cache drive configurations , but I couldn’t escape the constant 5-second access pattern. I finally went back to Proxmox and will cobbler together my own NAS setup. We’ll see how it goes.
Their use cases are a bit different, no? Proxmox is a general hypervisor. You can run whatever you want on it. NAS is one workload that could be run on top of Proxmox. TrueNAS is a NAS first solution, hypervisor second. And that’s the overlap with Proxmox. You could think of your core use case:
Well fuckin thank you for that concise explanation, because I’ve been planning to build a NAS and Jellyfin box, and have been wondering
You definitely want to go the truenas route for a media server.
I disagree in this case. Other posters are pointing out how Trunas support is aggressive and unhelpful. I also feel like a true hypervisor gives you more flexibility if your needs change later. I run a Jellyfin media server on proxmox, and it’s been rock solid.
Apparently people run TrueNAS in a VM on Proxmox and it works fine, it’s even supported by both Proxmox and TrueNAS.
I’ve tested both - the virtualization in TrueNAS is rather limited, so I moved over to Proxmox - I need good VM and Container support, in addition to storage management. I’ll probably go the TrueNAS on Proxmox route once I have real storage capability.
Can you explain how it is limited?
I’m assuming that TrueNas has basic features, and that I only need basic features, so Proxmox is probably overkill for me. What would I be missing if I only used TrueNas for virtualization? Before they talk about backups. It’s there anything else?
Yes, this is my thinking. I mainly need a NAS that will let me use some services. I’m just not sure what I’ll be missing if I forgo Proxmox. I’m assuming it is a lot of advanced settings I don’t need, but other users mentioned backups as a positive for Proxmox.
Can’t say. Personally, I’m running vanilla Ubuntu LTS and rolling my own ZFS, NFS, containers, desktop and so on but “I know what I’m doing.” I hardly see a reason to do TrueNAS outside of UI. With that said I would highly recommend to ensure your data sits on ZFS because it protects it from silent data corruption. If I had to choose between Proxmox and TrueNAS and one ensured my data is on ZFS, I’d choose that solution, and then think about other use cases.
I think both are on zfs, so that should be good.
I’m definitely a “no clue what I’m doing” user, so GUIs are helpful.
Thanks for the feedback, it’s helpful.