Keeping Truenas or switching to Scale?

[urobe]

Hey there,

our current infrastructure is as follows:

- Truenas Xeon 1200 v2, 16GB Ram, 10x 4TB WD RED (twice, live system and the offsite replication)
- Windows Server 2019, Xeon 1200 v6, 32 GB Ram, 8x Seagate Nytro 0,5 TB
- on the Windows Server is Virtual Box, running a Windows Box for a dokument management system, and a Debian running vaultwarden through docker.

The truenas device host a network smb share for 12 usere for office work, and a separate pool for backups from multiple devices.

Now I need another windows machine somewhere in a virtual environment, but the current windows server can't spare any further resources.

First I was looking at proxmox and considering moving all the virtual machines over there, until I stumbled over Truenas scale; Regarding Scale vs proxmox, I pretty much deciced on scale.

The new computer host of the virtual machines will be dual Xeon Gold 6148 system, currently with 128 gb of Ram but the board can host 2 TB of Ram.

Now I'm trying to decide what to do.

I see two paths,

1. leave the original truenas as a network storage and setup the dual xeon system with scale. In this case I'd need extra drives.

2. Or, I setup the new dual xeon system and use the 10x WDreds from the old truenas system on it, and basically use truenas scale also to provide the two smb shares.
Ultimately I'd also move then the windows Server also into the a VM in scale, which would mean that I could also include the 8x Nytro drives (maybe as fast system drives for the vm's?)

The second path seems like a bit of extra work, compared to the first one, but I wouldn't need any new drives, and also safe in electricity (very hot topic these days here in Germany).
I also considered putting the xeons into my existing turenas and use this as a place to host the vm's, but consiedering, that there is now a truenas "version" with a strong emphasis on vm's, it seems like a good idea to switch?

Any advise is greatly appreciated!
-Toby

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Why don't you run Windows Server on TrueNAS CORE like we do?

 

[urobe]

Why don't you run Windows Server on TrueNAS CORE like we do?

Right now my Truenas core system is only a 4 core xeon, and wouldn't have enough ram/cpu to run our server.

That would basically the last option I mentioned, moving my current core install to the stro0nger Xeon Gold hardware.

So I guess, the true question is, does it make sense to move to truenas scale? before setting up all of the vm's?
The native docker support is very tempting for me, also syncthing (currenlty runs on a windows machine), nextcloud, wireguard (currently running on pfsense), and photoprism are fueling the idea of switching.