TrueNAS on a existing SAN?

[MrManor]

Hi. Bear with me, I am a noob regarding TrueNAS. I guess this might even have been asked before, but my search in this forum did not really make me any wiser.

Our situation is that we currently have several SAN boxes (HP Nimble) of different age and size, attached to a VMware setup using iSCSI. In VMware we are currently running RHEL or Centos VM's acting as Samba/NFS servers. I would like to lay the road for eventually replacing the old SAN systems with TrueNAS when they are due to replacement. But for now we are stuck with the current hardware (and a management is possessed with the idea that every thing should be moved into the cloud)

Browsing this and other forums I get the feeling that running ZFS in a VM on top of a SAN is a bad idéa. But I would really like be able to utilize the other parts of TrueNAS, ease of use, handling SAMBA, NFS and other stuff - and generally getting the other sysadmins to know TrueNAS.

What is your suggestion - should I forget about TrueNAS until next hardware update?

 

[ChrisRJ]

What are the problems with the current setup that would warrant effort and risk of switching to TrueNAS?

 

[MrManor]

The vm's that function as file server is a old install and not anymore properly structured for our current size. Also they are based on OpenLDAP - with the improvement we have seen on sssd over the latest years, we now want to move our file servers to use AD and not have to keep OpenLDAP and AD in sync.
So the vm's sharing our data, and the layout of data on our store, will have to be migrated anyway.