Install and usage help please.

[jimdeanda]

I am so new to this! Anyway, I'm trying to get my head wrapped around TrueNAS. If I install it on a machine, is it a file server (etc) only? Can the machine to run Windows apps also? I apologize for naivete! Thank you. Jim

 

[Samuel Tai]

TrueNAS is a storage OS. It's bread and butter is serving files and blocks. To run Windows apps, you'd need to install a Windows OS within a VM on TrueNAS's bhyve hypervisor. However, bhyve isn't the greatest hypervisor, and hasn't been as extensively debugged as a dedicated virtualization platform as vmWare.

Some members here run TrueNAS and Windows side-by-side as VMs on vmWare on the same physical hardware. However, if you don't know what you're doing, you can easily lose data.