Seeking Advice: Proxmox, TrueNAS Setup on Dell Precision 7920 Workstation

[Himala]

Hello everyone,

After much contemplation, I opted for a used Dell Precision 7920 workstation boasting dual 20-core CPUs and 512GB RAM. This workstation features roughly 8 disk bays, and I intend to incorporate three 20TB hard drives alongside several 2TB SSDs.

To streamline my hardware and reduce electricity consumption, I'm considering running Proxmox on this workstation. Additionally, I'm thinking of installing either unRAID or TrueNAS as a VM with PCI passthrough for the 20TB drives and SSDs. I aim to allocate a portion of these drives back to Proxmox for VM storage, while Proxmox will also have its dedicated 2TB SSD.

I'd appreciate insights on whether this setup sounds feasible. Has anyone tackled a similar configuration on a Dell Precision 7920, or can anyone share advice or potential pitfalls to watch out for?

Thank you in advance for your expertise!

 

[zizzithefox]

On a dell precision 7920 no, but it's no diffent than any other machine.
As a general rule, do not do storage and GPU passthrough at the same time on older machines.

You can try Truenas first and I don't think you will go unraid unless you want specific features that Truenas CORE or truenas SCALE do not have.

If you are not satisfied, you can always import the ZFS pool into unraid I guess.

Only problem here is that ZFS (TrueNAS basically only has that) does not support online RAID expansion (a feature you might want). You can only add another group of disks to the pool, not one disk at a time; or you can just replace all the disks with bigger disks.

RAID expansion in ZFS is planned, but seriously I won't use it before 2030 if it comes out in 2024. To tell you the truth, I will probably never use it as it scares the hell out of me. Unraid way of doing it is much more safe, but ZFS is better in general so f**k raid expansion.

By the way, with Proxmox, be sure to follow the guide for virtualization passthrough on their site. It has everything you need. I have rarely seen such care in making instructions.

 

[Saoshen]

I would pick one or the other, not virtualize truenas on proxmox, or vice versa. You are just asking for trouble by making things more complicated.

But I'm sure plenty of other do it, so YOLO.

 

[zizzithefox]

I would pick one or the other, not virtualize truenas on proxmox, or vice versa. You are just asking for trouble by making things more complicated.

But I'm sure plenty of other do it, so YOLO.

Trouble is a big word. As you can see I have been running a virtualized truenas core for a year on shitty hardware, no problem.
But you have got a point.
In the sense that you probably don't need Proxmox if you are using unraid as you can run vms just fine with it.

But this is truenas forum. You definetely might want to virtualize Truenas core because that is not great as a virtualization platform.

Truenas scale is a different beast but still might not cut it.

Report of people having trouble is because they don't follow the instructions correctly.

Also there is a very powerful reason for using proxmox as a virtualization platform and that is Proxmox Backup Server. There is nothing on the market as powerful as that, except VmWare Vsphere + Veeam Backup.

That alone is reason to run everything you can on proxmox. Of course you should always have a second nas only machine for backups.