Truenas core on vmware esxi 7 or Truenas core OS? Windows 10 needed with gpu passthrough

[lesserthere]

I´m very undecided how to start a new set up.

I have my truenas core on hyperv (windows 10 pro) with raidz2. Not ideal I read.

Been playing around with esxi 7 and installing truenas in a vm and windows 10 in a 2nd VM
Passed through a disk for truenass pool. So far so good.

Now I´m thinking if I just installed Truenas Core as the OS and install Win10 as a VM on Truenas.
How well will windows 10 perform on truenas? Will I encounter any issues with a gpu gtx970 passthrough? Used for blueiris and codeproject AI not gaming.

Pros and cons of both options?

Main server that will be used:
64GB ram
4 x 4tb for raidz2 and 3 other disks
Asrock B50m pro-4
amd ryzen 3400g cpu.
Thermaltake 500
gtx970

Thanks

 

[lesserthere]

Also if I do go down the esxi route with truenas as a vm is it a fairly straight forward process of transferring my existing pool of disks raidz2?
export config - import onto new truenas. Will the config detect the attached disk as the original pool without having to erase and start from scratch?

 

[Pitfrr]

I can give you some feedback on my experience:

With an HP DL380G6, I use esxi as hypervisor and have FreeNAS (not TrueNAS yet! ) as a VM.
It's been working great (for home usage). I had to add an HBA that is passedthrough to FreeNAS and I reserved the RAM allocated to the VM since the native (P410i) one couldn't be used as an HBA.
But I use the native RAID controller as storage for the VMs.
I also played around with a GPU that is passedthrough to a windows 10 VM. Worked very well.

If you go the esxi route, make sure to read the resource about it.
I don't see why you would have problems to get your data in TrueNAS? I assume you have a pool in RAIDz2, right? Nothing virtualized?
So it's only a matter of taking the disks from one system to an other an importing the volume.

Whereas for the TrueNAS route (as hypervisor), I can't give any feedback about that, never tried it... :-O

 

[lesserthere]

I can give you some feedback on my experience:

With an HP DL380G6, I use esxi as hypervisor and have FreeNAS (not TrueNAS yet! ) as a VM.
It's been working great (for home usage). I had to add an HBA that is passedthrough to FreeNAS and I reserved the RAM allocated to the VM since the native (P410i) one couldn't be used as an HBA.
But I use the native RAID controller as storage for the VMs.
I also played around with a GPU that is passedthrough to a windows 10 VM. Worked very well.

If you go the esxi route, make sure to read the resource about it.
I don't see why you would have problems to get your data in TrueNAS? I assume you have a pool in RAIDz2, right? Nothing virtualized?
So it's only a matter of taking the disks from one system to an other an importing the volume.

Whereas for the TrueNAS route (as hypervisor), I can't give any feedback about that, never tried it... :-O

Thanks for the feedback.
Last night I span up truenas on bare metal and added a windows vm.

Was really laggy amd slow compared to esxi.
Bumped up the resources but still the same.
Was using virto drivers also.
Not sure if I am missing something or that's just a tradeoff for using a platform designed for nas storage

 

[lesserthere]

Logged in this morning after leaving the windows vm running overnight and it had frozen, unresponsive.
Powered it off.
cpu temps dropped 20c!!
hmm something not right at all.

Span up a new one, again the same issue. Just opening Edge makes the vm cpu shoot up to 100% even if I had more resources.
Never had these issues with esxi or proxmox.

Just trying again but NIC changed to Virtio...
Really wanted to make this work as I do like truenas a lot

 

[lesserthere]

Reading around a few more threads like this one

Windows 10 crashing in VM

Hello all, I am very new to the whole VM in TrueNAS thing. I've had FreeNAS and TrueNAS for a long time, but never once used the VM section. My problem is when I start the VM, I have noVNC open, I see the TianoCORE logo and the VM boots, then anywhere from 5-45 minutes later, it either lets me...

www.truenas.com

changing NIC to virtIO has made a difference and not using VNC!
But it´s still unstable, cpu falling and spiking when no extras are running on it, just the built in services!
Still going to look into tweaking it and running some programs on it like Blueiris as it was intended for.

 

[lesserthere]

Installed the app Plex and currently streaming - works flawlessly on core with cpu not even touched!
So why so many issues with Windows?

 

[lesserthere]

Decided to go back to proxmox and trying out Scale as a VM. I do like the app section and so easy to install like frigate, nodered and frigate.

Windows up and running as a vm with gpu passthrough working.

Can I used the exported config file from Core and import to Scale are or are they not compatible?