Does using TrueNAS as a Hyper-V VM make sense?

[chipconnjohn]

Hello All,

I'm looking for a replacement for a QNAP Nas which is getting old. We have about 4 TB of data on it.

We have a Dell PowerEdge T340 which is running Server 2019 Std and has one Hyper-V VM running Server 2019 standard for AD and GP. It has 64GB RAM, a PERC H730p RAID controller with 6 x 4TB SATA drives in a RAID 6.

There is plenty of storage on the server.

My question is, would using TrueNas in a Hyper-V VM make sense? From everything I'm reading a lot of the power of TrueNas is gained by it living on the physical hardware. The server has about 20 users, but really only 5-6 simultaneous users at a time. There are big file syncs that happen with remote users at night a few times a week. (They work on big graphics files locally, then store backups of those jobs on the server once or twice a week over VPN.)

Thanks much,
-John

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

The power of TrueNAS comes from ZFS having direct access to the disk drives. Using a "hardware RAID" or even worse virtual disk images brings a high probability of data loss.

OTOH with that server in place and working why not just use this for SMB file sharing?

 

[chipconnjohn]

The power of TrueNAS comes from ZFS having direct access to the disk drives. Using a "hardware RAID" or even worse virtual disk images brings a high probability of data loss.

OTOH with that server in place and working why not just use this for SMB file sharing?

Right, forgot a detail. Half the office is Mac. Originally, there was going to be a Server 2019 file server, but the Macs had all sorts of problems. The Linux versions of SMB work better.

My idea with TrueNas is to have a an established system that I can roll out vs building my own with say, Ubuntu.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Then deploy a dedicated TrueNAS system integrated with your AD. Don't use virtualised TrueNAS with virtual disks in a business context, please. This is a sure road to disaster.

You can run virtualised TrueNAS if you have a dedicated SAS HBA that you pass through to the VM and a completely separate set of disks connected to that HBA and hence TrueNAS.