Proxmox Inception

[otpi]

So many virtualized TrueNAS instances. Two sides can play that game!

In all seriousness:

• Is there a use case?
• Any gotchas? Or best practice?
• I allocated 1 CPU, 8 cores and 2 threads per core (basically 1 of two CPUs in this server). Is it better to just use 16C/1T?
• I used pass-through for CPU
• I have some experience running Proxmox, and I'd like to move (cold migrate) those VMs to this new system (amd to Intel).

Anyway. Proxmox now has a small corner in my TrueNAS Scale box.

 

[thomas-hn]

So you will let run Proxmox VE on top of KVM? Isn't this a huge overhead because of double virtualization (TrueNAS KVM + Proxmox) for each of your Proxmox virtual machines?

 

[otpi]

huge overhead

I don't know. I figured I'd try. In my mind there should be very little overhead as the CPU is passed through.

Mostly I'm just playing around and was looking to see if I could live migrate VMs from my amd proxmox server to this proxmoxVM

It could be used for quorum in a HA setup where you're one physical box short and want to use TrueNAS on one...

 

[thomas-hn]

Is there any new knowledge about this topic?

 

[otpi]

It works. I can migrate just fine. I found some articles investigating nested kvm performance. There's a penalty, but depends.

I have some networking issues, but that's not related to nesting hypervisors.

 

[thomas-hn]

It works. I can migrate just fine. I found some articles investigating nested kvm performance. There's a penalty, but depends.

As almost one year has passed since the discussion above:
Do you still use this setup?
Have you found any issues so far?
Would you recommend this type of setup?

 

[otpi]

Almost a year?! time...

I do. It's still in homelab "production". So it is working: Two VMs, one windows VM and one linux VM in proxmox, which is itself running as a VM under Scale... Both running 24/7 applications. I could not be bothered to set up the apps on new VMs in Scale. Proxmox "live migrate" was just so easy :)

There is the issue of Truenas Scale (GUI) no longer recognizing that the proxmoxVM is running, but it certainly is, since proxmox is alive and serving its purpose of being a node in my proxmox lab (with two active VMs, as mentioned). I'm sure it would fix itself if I had to reboot my Truenas Scale lab, but time... and stuff... and... But up-time is great, soon to be a full year!

If I would recommend this setup: I don't know. It works. But is it sub-optimal? maybe... My motivation was to quickly migrate VMs from a proxmox node with minimum downtime, and I had the resources. Hardware was free, and I was planning to migrate my (Free)NAS to this 'new' hardware using TrueNAS, and scale was the new thing. I even set up plex on Scale using the new fancy docker thing mapping my old FreeNAS 'media' folder for testing. Then I got distracted. So my FreeNAS is still going strong, Truenas Scale is still chugging, Plex is still reading the media library of the old NAs and the ProxmoxVM works like a charm.