How to run TrueNAS on Proxmox? 

I can't tell you how many times I've watched this video for the CLI way to add the hard drives. Thank yo so much.

You're just an amazing mentor! Thanks for all the knowledge, much appreciated

super helpful, especially how to setup drives connected to the motherboard controller. Works fine for a simple media pool. THANKS!

For better Processor access and usage, set the CPU type to host and then it will be hardware rather than software access and processing. I have been running this for a few months and it is solid!

love the honesty and dedication man, keep going :)

I loved that you showed how to do it without pcie passthrough, every tutorial did pcie which wouldnt work for my setup! Thank you so much!!

You are just a freaking beast man. I don't care how long it takes you to make videos or whatever.. You changed my life man and I am thankful. Best wishes from Pakistan :)

Excellent video. Thanks for elaborating on how to set up the physical drives independently with the Truenas VM. Personally, I would instead use RaidZ and have TrueNas control the RAID System rather than having to use a controller to manage the hard drives. I'm sure you would sacrifice a little performance. However, everyone's use case can be different.

Perfect. Got my TrueNAS VM up in 10 minutes. Computers are so cool these days. Also, for any of your videos, much respect for your brevity. All the details we need while respecting our time.

Thank you. I've been struggling to make this work for a couple of days. It works now.

I just wanna say THANK YOU! This video is the only one that explains how to add a hard disk not the card itself. It can be not elegant but for me that don´t have a card and it´s hard to get one in affordable price (i live in Brazil) works perfect! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

great content like always! keep up the good work

love your work!! thank you so much

Awesome! This video was very helpful. Much appreciated.

Followed this. Worked like a charm.

Thank you! This was a great video!

champion, excellent guide as always

fantastic, you solved my TRUE nas migration from old server to new Proxmox true nas vm

This video is really really the top of the iceberg. A few crucial thing is missing from this like: - excluding the disks from pve, or else you will wonder why it periodically interrupts disk operations or wakes up sleeping disks - disabling the "use tablet for pointer" as that in itself causes 10+% CPU load on the host side for some reason - disabling "hardware" acceleration of virtIO as this is known to cause problems - doing smart configuration (like APM, idle times) on the host side as the guest won't have access to smart data and alerts - optionally moving the system dataset to the boot disk

Thanks for the detailed video and I'm looking forward to videos about Sophos XG :-)

Super cool video!

Finally a tutorial I actually understood. Dankeschön!

great walk thru...thank you

I'm currently using zfs pool on proxmox itself and a LXC container as a network storage but I think your way is much better

I'm looking forward to Rockstor 4. Btrfs raid-1c3 is just so nice and to have native support and custom Docker support is quite nice.

I like this vid. Good insight.

Thank you really much for showing how to connect or passthrough those hard disks! I've googled this before and people wrote, that this is impossible!!! SO WRONG. Your method works like a charme! Thank you thank you really much, you are really a kind guy!!! :) Greets TheItalian :)

One little thing (and I've been seeing this in a lot of similar tutorials), but "SCSI" is pronounced "Scuzzy". Probably not something that comes up a lot if you didn't work in enterprise storage in the 90s, so I'm not surprised that nobody else has mentioned it

I run truenas scale on a z620 with an asmedia pci chip. It's passthrough, and it works great with two drives mirrored... 10TB. Been running proxmox for about 4 years now

Amazing, thanks mate !

Very helpful. I so plan to virtualize some of my file storage. I'd like to have separate VM / machines for different storage purposes. So, glad that you overviewed how you did it.

Thanks, You helped my a lot

This is excellent thank you for the in depth review. I was wondering on your options for a NAS on Proxmox how would that apply if I implemented a Proxmox cluster with HA? Knowing we can't mirror the serial # of hard drives do you know of options I could look into?

Thank you for this. :D

Nice one again. 👍 I have been running Free/TrueNAS on bare metal for years and love it. Tried it firs on consumer grade HW but it runs much better on a really old Proliant G5. I think its the ecc memory that boost the performance. Ecc memory and battery helps when things go sideways - as it usually do at som point. I also have virtualization TrueNAS servers from time to time. My settings are different but generally the same as yours. I have been thinking of moving my production TrueNAS to Proxmox just to have all machines running Proxmox make some work easier. I run 3 Proxmox servers and a ProxmoxBS and then the TrueNAS. I have 4 HP servers in my rack and one self build. I strongly recommend real server HW due to performance and cost. SAS is superior but SATA is cheap - your choice. I will not recommend the Scale at this time due to the weak performans as to date (see Tom Lawrence videos)

Not necessarily need ecc, it helps but not necessary. ZFS actually checksums the data as it goes into the drive, so it actually prevents data corruption that would have been an actual issue with traditional raid. The thing with ecc RAM is mostly for example the case of a database where you have large amount of data being transacted in flight and then ZFS is writing that back to the hard drive, but it actually checksums the data as it is writing it. For file storage it isn't that much of an issue.

Note that the disk serial number results for some nvme devices in ridiculous long serial numbers, so I prefer to use the UUID of disk or partition for the creation of the datapool. I always split my HDDs in 2 partitions, the first ~40% faster partition is for the VMs and the remainder for the other stuff. As a consequence the SSD I use for caching has four partition, 2x cache (L2ARC) and 2x log (ZIL).

Thank you!

Well explained.

3400 views of this great video,,, and only "156 likes" shame on these people,,, hit the likes people!!!!,,, this is someone doing hard work for us to view and learn....!

Thanks Christian for this video. Is it possible with passthrough HDDs to use an smb share as mount point to a docker container like ecoDMS? The docker ist on the same proxmox as truenas

Great video! I have my TrueNAS system virtualized for well over two years now and it runs flawlessly. Using Vmware ESXi. :)

Excellent video and instruction I appreciate your dedication to the community. I did have a question in regards to this process and Proxmox Clustering. What considerations need to be made there? Can this same process be done at the DataCenter level?

Thanks! I really got a lot from this video. I also benchmarked using the same volume set with direct hardware versus via a hypervisor. My file read/write test on a 1 GB file direct hardware was around 19 to 20 seconds whereas via a hypervisor it was around 22 seconds. So I can see some overhead but no too much. I'm still debating if I want to go direct hardware or via Proxmox. It's just not so clear what the advantages are except if I had a complex confirmation and I didn't want to redo it. It seems you can easily import volumes that were disjoined from the operating system in TrueNAS via the import command.

Did you try to install a VM into the TrueNAS managed storage? Or do you just provide the space managed in truenas to the VMs as additional storage, e.g. as a remote /home?

At 13.24 where you mention about the bios mode, since you you propose to viewers to passthrough an hba controller, it would be better to select uefi and q35 options for the VM, as it is way better when you are passing through a pci device.

I've done this for some time , now I require the securing your home server with a firewall video asap please :D

This does solve one part of the problem that Proxmox is not so great for providing space if you do not want to separate the file server (or NAS) and the VE engine. But one problem remains: the TrueNAS VM cannot be snapshottet, since it has pass-thrus. Also, this is a viable solution only if you deploy new hardware - you are in trouble when you try to migrate a huge array that is on an existing RAID, probably also encrypted. I have yet found no way of doing this - if Proxmox mounts the device, it must also provide the shares (which is not very good at). Every other solution carries over the control to an embedded VM, which can then not be snapshottet like other VMs. Containers are not a solution for this, either.

1. Thanks! 2. First time NAS and ProxMox user. 3. I added 2 HDDs to a new install using your method. TrueNAS says they have same serial number. I drilled down in the "Disks" list and they both have empty serial numbers (which makes them equal I suppose). I will now look back at the QEMU command that added them and see if something there about serial numbers.

I know this comment is very late but not all motherboards have SATA as something you cannot passthrough, some boards show their sata controller as PCIe devices/chipset and allow you to passthrough them to said VMs (works for me, however it doesn't mean that It'll work for everyone)

I'd love to see a solution that takes an old outdated dedicated NAS, connects it to a Pi running the NAS appliance and then gives you a (new) webgui+SSH+updates for the physically old Nas. :)

Very cool.

hello thx for this video very useful.However if one disk fail how can you make to change It because I suppose you have to declare un new physical volume in proxmox is that easy

Hi Christian and everyone, with the passthrough of the disks to Truenas, do you have the SMART tests working? I can't see any tests results and even if I try a manual run, I got an error message "Short offline self test failed [unsupported scsi opcode]", does not matter the type of test selected.

In proxmox 8 you can get the model and serial number for the drives in the Disks section of your node

I am trying to do a very similar setup but when I installed Proxmox I set up a ZFS RAIDz1 pool over three SATA disks. I can add that pool as a disk source from the Proxmox add hard drive menu. Should I have not set up ZFS on those disks via Proxmox and used the method in this video of adding the individual disks to the Truenas VM and then creating my zpool from within Truenas? What are the consequences of these two different methods?

Was the reason to pass through the HD vs just allocating a pool of space from proxmox for the storage?

Exactly what I was looking for!

How do I configure a disk array or disk bay? I want to buy bare metal and then populate it with some disks. Can you please share some idea on how to set that up?

Does the hard drive you pass through have to only be used by Truenas? As an example, I have a large hard drive that has files for home assistant and Jellyfin on it. Do I need to move those to another hard drive before passing it through to Truenas?

Is it possible to create a folder on the zfs for photos other videos other for books with different record size (depending on file size) to optimize the space?

Hello! great video! I have an question. Isnt the best way to use the /dev/sda1 /dev/sda2 and etc identification to passthru the hard drives from mainboard? in case of failure of hard drive you can offline it from truenas, power off the whole system and replase it to new one. you plug new hard drive and mount it in truenas and thats it. otherwise you must write the new id of new disk in proxmox at first.

I just did approximately the same set-up, but I noticed that you don't have IOMMU enabled on your server? If you enable IOMMU in your motherboard BIOS, you're able to pass through the onboard SATA controllers as PCIe devices to your VMs (in this case TrueNAS). This gives the VM hardware-level access to the controller and all attached disks, and thus means more native performance + being able to do S.M.A.R.T. tests on the disks.

what is the outcome in relative terms when comparing no passthrough vs passthrough?

Hello Christian, thanks again for your great content. Quick question, could you tell me what kind of terminal you re using? I kind of like the look of the interface... Thank you again

It's been 2 years now and I wonder if you'd keep this as a setup? Any downside found in terms of performances or reliability during that time? Or perhaps you are rocking now a different setup for the storage part of your Homelab?

Great video. I tried the passthrough and it works flawlessly. Just a question: why do we not add the hard disks to the VM via the PVE GUI? I think you would need to set the disks as storage devices in PVE (like you have with the truenas named storage)? I sadly skipped that part so can't try for myself if it is possible.

Noob question: Any reason why we are passing the block devices through rather than creating a QCOW2 file? Are we looking at data corruption if we do this? I intend to create CephFS block storage on my cluster and use a sizable chunk of qcow2 for datastorage. I also intend to use proxmox backup server to take backups of the truenas VM.

What is betterwith for Trunas on Proxmox? Pass through disk, pass through sata controller or just do do that and use virtual disks?

I've been tempted by TrueNAS, but I already have an existing folder structure on my external drives that I don't want to lose. I ended up just mounting the external drive on my pve host and pointing SAMBA at it.

what would be a decent budget hba card? im new to this im probably never going to use more then 12 drives ever if anything's as well im just trying to virtualize my truenas and my firewall

Sweet! Are you able to use thst pool which you created in TrueNas back in the Proxmox utilizing RAID? I sume you could, but How about when TrueNas is not running? Are there any disadvatgaes with this sort of approach you can think of? Why not to rather have TrueNas as a main OS and use virtualization There?

hi do you have any idea if the passthru would work with hp 530sfp+ card cause i cant get it to work

Is it possible to add network card or network cad interface (in case when one card carry more than one interface) the same way as You added HDD? with out bridge, not by vmbr0 but directly eno0 let's say

How do you replace a dead HD? I've tried to replace my failed HD the normal way you would if TN was installed on bare metal but TN does not recognize the new HD when installed into the server. Thanks great video!

Interesting... would anyone know if is possible to refer the hard-drivers by ID to a VM and still accessing them via Proxmox? As if the ZFS is used by two systems at the same time.

Would you do a video doing Stress performance test for your storages? I suppose you might want to test regular HDD vs SSD as a control point, then going up to NAS solutions? just an opinion for a new video.

I built my current Proxmox server around AMD 3400G CPU, before understanding the risk associated with non ECC memory. However, I agree with Michael that for home users it's not so much an issue. Plus one should not rely on ZFS or any RAID system equivalent for backup. For that reason I also use Backblaze, which has very reasonable rates for offsite backup storage. Then in the unlikely event that my data gets corrupted, I can rebuild it. I am using Alpine Linux/SMB LXC container as a file server right now, but I really liked TrueNAS (was using my Proxmox box as standalone TrueNAS server) and will most likely switch to a TrueNAS VM in the near future. But LXC containers are a whole lot of fun, and very efficient.

hey good video mate!. I ran my first trueness- proxmox install. I'm having issues with my Kubernetes cluster. not launching. any ideas in how to troubleshot that? cheers!!

Instead of by-id is there a way to do the drive linking by physical port? I have a 24bay hot-swap chassis I want half the bays to be assigned to one program (truenas, unraid, etc) and the rest to another, but I am uneducated in linux things including commands and this "ssh"

I have done a similar setup just a few days ago, with an old Fujitsu D3417 MoBo. I have installed Proxmox on a nvme ssd drive and therefore the buildin sata controller (00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Q170/Q150/B150/H170/H110/Z170/CM236 Chipset SATA Controller [AHCI Mode] (rev 31)) was unused an i could easyly passthough it to the Truenas vm.

Hello, I am also going to build my first nas at home, I have 4x 8TB Hdd, that I have used i my old Readynas. But now I want to run Proxmos on a ssd disk, and have vm like truenas... My question is, should I install the truenas on the ssd or sould I install it on my raid with my 4 hhd ?

I am currently running truenas bare metal but I do want to move it to a virtual machine through proxmox. Can I simply backup the data and the config file and use that? So once installation on proxmox is complete, can I just upload the config file and the set-up will look exactly like my previous installation minus the data?

Hi, If I create another VM in Proxmox I should be able to access this TrueNAS right? As a shared storage among both VMs and Physical devices connected to the Host.

I tried doing this for the os drive of previous installs but they wouldn't load (both truenas and a windows 10 disk/vm) any ideas?

Now, there is a confusing topic to me, which is File system, you mentioned that truenas(core) had its own software raid, proxmox uses a software raid aswell, but what about the hardware raid card in a server how to configure it correctly then?

I just used this, but couldn't find the Serial in the disk/by-id folder. By adding -l to the list command I could see which one is sda / sdb and so on. Maybe this helps others too

Hello @christianlempa! Im running truenas on proxmox, but i need to changee the motherboard, could you make a tutotial on how to migrate everithing to the new sistem without loosing data?

How do you install the qemu-guest,-agent on the TrueNAS Core VM?

I can find the video for the home server spec. But is there an actual video showing the build from start to finish?

I cant get my HBA controller to passthrough to me TN VM. The drives are all listed under the node level and show up using lsblk. IOMMU is enabled in the BIOS. It is an LSI 3900 16i on a ROMED8-2T. Also couldnt pass the native on board sas controllers to pass through either.

Hi, how is it possible to automate backups of the truenas vm without the data-disks?

curious about virtio block vs. the virtio scsi you're using in the video. Also - some people suggest write-back cache (*not* the one that is labeled "unsafe" of course). Anyone do testing with these?

let's say that i've setup a truenas/freenas or unraid within a vm. and i want this nas to use my to 2 harddrives in raid 1. would that be possible?

Any reason to still go for TrueNAS CORE instead of SCALE?

Would be really cool if you could do a video about importing existing pools from other NAS' such as QNAP and Synology into TrueNAS. Totally not asking because that's what I need to figure out since my QNAP kicked the bucket or anything...

Hi, thanks for the great videos on TrueNAS. I currently have only one problem and I can not get it to run the S.M.A.R.T service under TrueNAS. Unfortunately it does not start. Thank you.

hi, nice video but did u get for example model data displayed in vm? i tried to passthrough physical hdd to omv5 vm and it didnt see either of model/smart, tried scsi, sata ide modes etc, thx4response :)

Hallo Christan, sobald ich meinen HBA Controller durchreiche bootet TrueNAS nicht mehr, selbst beim manuellen auswählen des TrueNAS Boot HDD im SeaBIOS. Problem mit der Methode einzeln durchzureichen SMART TESTS funktionieren nicht. :( Wäre cool wenn du ein Video dazu machen könntest. Weitere infos: Bei kommt beim Booten mit HBA immer der Fehler "this harddrive is only a truenas data partition" oder so ähnlich, aber ohne HBA funktioniert es. Die bootreihenfolge ändern oder deaktivieren von Geräten unter options in der vm hat auch nichts gebracht.

I like these videos, but they'd be way more useful if you said more about the "why" behind the procedures. Yes, it's possible to virtualize TrueNAS, and you've done a great job of telling us how to do it. But what, if anything do we actually gain by doing this? What's the reason? ....because you can? It seems that the more roles / VMs / functions are added to a single physical machine, the more exposed it becomes in the event of hardware failure. If my production server, NAS, gaming rig, etc., are all in the same machine, when something goes physically wrong, instead of just losing one, I lose all. Of course, if the point is just to use the platform as a learning tool, that makes total sense, and it's probably a great idea to have one or more 'disposable' machines laying around for practice and learning. Great tutorials. Thanks!