Considering coming back to Truenas/Freenas after 7 years in Proxmox ZFS land

[Intel]

I'm looking to understand how mature TrueNAS scale is today and learn about any gotchas, tips about this new system?

Some background:
- I used to use FreeNAS (BSD based) back in 2008 before ZFS got hyped up or became mainstream and linux supported.
- Originally I ran FreeNAS as a VM inside vmware ESXi (all-in-one home server) with passing thru an LSI M1015 storage controller.
- At one point, there was an update pushed that corrupted my FreeNAS system - my choice was to import my ZFS storage pool into fresh install or at that time ZFSonlinux was out and there were folks moving the storage pools to Proxmox PVE (this was my opportunity to ditch vmware - so I took it).

Fast forward to today:
- While I am happy with Proxmox PVE, I am considering simplyfing my home all-in-one server. TrueNAS Scale seems to be "perfect" because I wanted to run containers/docker + VMs + storage stuff.
- I have a new server build which does not have a dedicated LSI storage controller but the motherboard support multiple SATA 6 channels (MSI Mortar B550M), I slapped TrueNAS Scale on it today to take it for a spin.

My less than a day experience; so far TrueNAS scale shows to continue to be a robust storage focused solution; I am still learning how containers work here but I do feel that perhaps virtualization support feels to be in its infancy still. What's everyone's experience here?

My needs are simple:
- SMB shares for windows (have zero doubt TrueNAS will have any issues here)
- Apple shares for mac (Time Machine backups - never used these in FreeNAS in 2008 - how is it?)
- VMs for multiple different OS with ability to send traffic to specific VLANs on my network (the server NIC needs to be able to do tagging and I should be able to map the VM to the software linux bridge interfaces - does TNAS support this natively and easily?)

Random migration questions:
- TNAS Scale seems to have some hybrid ZFS + Gluster thing going on; how does this impact my ability to take my hard drives (physical devices) and connect them to a non TrueNAS server (say running OpenZFS on debian)?

Thanks in advance.

 

[morganL]

I'm looking to understand how mature TrueNAS scale is today and learn about any gotchas, tips about this new system?

Some background:
- I used to use FreeNAS (BSD based) back in 2008 before ZFS got hyped up or became mainstream and linux supported.
- Originally I ran FreeNAS as a VM inside vmware ESXi (all-in-one home server) with passing thru an LSI M1015 storage controller.
- At one point, there was an update pushed that corrupted my FreeNAS system - my choice was to import my ZFS storage pool into fresh install or at that time ZFSonlinux was out and there were folks moving the storage pools to Proxmox PVE (this was my opportunity to ditch vmware - so I took it).

Fast forward to today:
- While I am happy with Proxmox PVE, I am considering simplyfing my home all-in-one server. TrueNAS Scale seems to be "perfect" because I wanted to run containers/docker + VMs + storage stuff.
- I have a new server build which does not have a dedicated LSI storage controller but the motherboard support multiple SATA 6 channels (MSI Mortar B550M), I slapped TrueNAS Scale on it today to take it for a spin.

My less than a day experience; so far TrueNAS scale shows to continue to be a robust storage focused solution; I am still learning how containers work here but I do feel that perhaps virtualization support feels to be in its infancy still. What's everyone's experience here?

My needs are simple:
- SMB shares for windows (have zero doubt TrueNAS will have any issues here)
- Apple shares for mac (Time Machine backups - never used these in FreeNAS in 2008 - how is it?)
- VMs for multiple different OS with ability to send traffic to specific VLANs on my network (the server NIC needs to be able to do tagging and I should be able to map the VM to the software linux bridge interfaces - does TNAS support this natively and easily?)

Random migration questions:
- TNAS Scale seems to have some hybrid ZFS + Gluster thing going on; how does this impact my ability to take my hard drives (physical devices) and connect them to a non TrueNAS server (say running OpenZFS on debian)?

Thanks in advance.

The mapping of VMs to bridges and VLANs is probably the area you most want to investigate. Let us know if it doesn't work or is too clunky.

ZFS + gluster is only an issue if you build a cluster of nodes... otherwise its standard OpenZFS.

 

[sretalla]

- Apple shares for mac (Time Machine backups - never used these in FreeNAS in 2008 - how is it?)

These are also now SMB... AFP should be avoided.

VMs for multiple different OS with ability to send traffic to specific VLANs on my network (the server NIC needs to be able to do tagging and I should be able to map the VM to the software linux bridge interfaces - does TNAS support this natively and easily?)

The networking can be done, but watch out for custom configs on the VMs... you can't do things like pass in individual USB ports (at least not for now).