I’m in the process of migrating my system to some new hardware. I was curious on everyone’s thoughts about Proxmox vs. TrueNAS Scale.
Here is some background -
I’m currently running a mini-computer, with Debian, attached to an external hard drive. I host Plex, -arr suite, PhotoPrism/Photo backup space, Syncthing and some other apps. It runs fine, but could probably use some more memory. I also haven’t had a lot of luck backing up all my family’s data (on and off different cloud services) in one place in a way that avoids duplicates. My 4TB HDD is at about 80% full now. I have an offsite synology that I back up to using Syncthing. Syncthing has been having some problems lately, so I’m looking at some other options for that too.
I’ve been wanting to move my storage to an internal HDD, so I bought a larger used computer and a hard drive so that I can clean my setup a bit. It has an i3 8100, 500GB M2, 256 SSD, 8TB HDD and 24GB ram. To experiment, I’ve been running Proxmox and set up a few VMs including TrueNAS.
Proxmox has been pretty amazing. I thought I would have a TrueNAS VM, my Debian-based Plex/-arr VM, and then another Debian vm where I could just test different software that I wanted to host. I haven’t really experimented with the LXMs yet.
I started testing out TrueNAS and saw that it also offers virtualization. If so, I probably wouldn’t need Proxmox for my purposes.
With all that, here are some questions -
What do you think about Proxmox vs. TrueNAS? Any reason to prefer one over the other?
What do you think about having a Debian VM to host my Plex and -arr suite? What are the pros and cons of that method vs. hosting the apps on my TrueNAS or Proxmox as containers? I think mainly it would just be portability and isolation.
Currently, my external HDD is formatted so you could also plug it into Windows and read the contents. If something happens to me, I would like my family to be able to easily access the data. I need to figure out a good way to ensure it is easily accessible to them.
Thanks in advance!
Edit for posterity: after this post, I tried TrueNas, but was annoyed because the HDD was constantly being accessed. I tried unRAID after that, but had a similar problem with HDD access noise. I tried several cache drive configurations , but I couldn’t escape the constant 5-second access pattern. I finally went back to Proxmox and will cobbler together my own NAS setup. We’ll see how it goes.
This is a great post with lots of info that I’ll need to dig into once I have time.
I’ve been running truenas CORE for like 3 years with adguard, emby server, and jellyfin running on it. 2 6tb HDDs in my zfs pool and a backup 6tb drive. As well as smb shares for the network.
Running all this on my gaming PC I built 12 years ago with 16gb of ram and 3770k processor.
Truenas has been awesome and I’ve learned a lot.
Recently picked up some thin clients so I’ve been learning proxmox and lxc containers (plus Linux in general) but haven’t quite figured out how to have proxmox zfs stuff take over for truenas for local network shares.Someone has already linked to the setup installing truenas on a VM on proxmox, which I started but haven’t made much progress yet.
Running game servers in docker inside lxc containers is pretty dang cool though
As mentioned by others, if your primary use case is storage/NAS with only one or two VMs, then for sure go with TrueNAS SCALE.
Where Proxmox wins is the easy backups for VMs/containers locally to disk, local NAS or remote NAS, easy management when you have a lot of VMs (I feel like there’s too much clicking through menus in the TN UI which gets annoying fast), more recent kernel and ability to use LXC.
I use both in my homelab and I keep TrueNAS as a NAS and Docker host via Jailmaker script (for services that benefit from direct/local file bind mounts) because I really dislike the way the TrueNAS Apps feature is handled.
In my experience, TN Apps are just not stable and seem to get randomly stuck ‘deploying’ for no good reason after being restarted or updated. Combine that with the general hostility of the forums and of TrueCharts, and so I decided to not have anything to do with the Apps feature. IX changed a few things to do with app storage that then forced TrueCharts to change how they do things, so there’s been a few occasions where the only solution has been to delete and recreate containers which pissed off a lot of users.
Jailmaker lets me use Docker Compose inside a systemd-nspawn container. It’s kind of funny how this nested containerisation method ended up being a hell of a lot more reliable than TN Apps. I don’t want this to sound like I’m ungrateful for the good things they’ve done for TN by making services easy to run, but their reading their posts, their behaviour and tone online just always makes me shake my head.
I use Proxmox and don’t use Truenas. My setup is basically to install Cockpit on the host server via apt-get and then the 45 Drives cockpit-sharing plugin. This provides the NFS and Samba sharing I need and use. I host Home Assistant in a VM and Docker containers in a few LXC containers which host about 10 containers each. Then, in combination with https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ you can set up pretty much anything you need from there.
This is on in computer terms, ancient; a 13 year old Dell Optiplex 990 with 16gb Ram and software such as Authentik and Vaultwarden from different dedicated LXC containers. Never have any issues with overload of the system resources or running out of memory. It’s pretty much rock solid.
Proxmox. Flexibility for both new services via VM/LXC and backups (just install proxmox backup server alongside and you get incremental backups with nice retention settings, file-restore capabilities as well as backup consistency checks)
If it’s in a VM/container you don’t need to worry about backups, see 1.
In this case isn’t it sufficient to be able to access the data via Windows network?
By a backup server, is that an additional component to my proxmox install? Could I back things up to the offsite Synology? I assume it isn’t a separate box on the network?
In what ways is proxmox virtualization more flexible than TrueNas? I thought it was fairly similar for basic things (my use case). I do realize they are built for different purposes, I just don’t need a lot of virtualization.
For some reason I’ve never had luck setting up network shares for Windows on my network. I should really figure that out.
Thanks for the response. I’ll check it the backup server in more detail.
You setup Proxmox Backup Server on separate hardware and then you add it as a storage option in your Proxmox Virtualization Server.
I haven’t dived into it but I imagine you could run the Proxmox Backup Server as a VM in your Synology NAS. https://www.proxmox.com/images/download/pbs/docs/proxmox-backup-3-1.pdf
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This is a great post with lots of info that I’ll need to dig into once I have time.
I’ve been running truenas CORE for like 3 years with adguard, emby server, and jellyfin running on it. 2 6tb HDDs in my zfs pool and a backup 6tb drive. As well as smb shares for the network.
Running all this on my gaming PC I built 12 years ago with 16gb of ram and 3770k processor.
Truenas has been awesome and I’ve learned a lot.
Recently picked up some thin clients so I’ve been learning proxmox and lxc containers (plus Linux in general) but haven’t quite figured out how to have proxmox zfs stuff take over for truenas for local network shares.Someone has already linked to the setup installing truenas on a VM on proxmox, which I started but haven’t made much progress yet.
Running game servers in docker inside lxc containers is pretty dang cool though
As mentioned by others, if your primary use case is storage/NAS with only one or two VMs, then for sure go with TrueNAS SCALE.
Where Proxmox wins is the easy backups for VMs/containers locally to disk, local NAS or remote NAS, easy management when you have a lot of VMs (I feel like there’s too much clicking through menus in the TN UI which gets annoying fast), more recent kernel and ability to use LXC.
I use both in my homelab and I keep TrueNAS as a NAS and Docker host via Jailmaker script (for services that benefit from direct/local file bind mounts) because I really dislike the way the TrueNAS Apps feature is handled.
In my experience, TN Apps are just not stable and seem to get randomly stuck ‘deploying’ for no good reason after being restarted or updated. Combine that with the general hostility of the forums and of TrueCharts, and so I decided to not have anything to do with the Apps feature. IX changed a few things to do with app storage that then forced TrueCharts to change how they do things, so there’s been a few occasions where the only solution has been to delete and recreate containers which pissed off a lot of users.
Jailmaker lets me use Docker Compose inside a systemd-nspawn container. It’s kind of funny how this nested containerisation method ended up being a hell of a lot more reliable than TN Apps. I don’t want this to sound like I’m ungrateful for the good things they’ve done for TN by making services easy to run, but their reading their posts, their behaviour and tone online just always makes me shake my head.
Sorry this turned into a rant.
I use Proxmox and don’t use Truenas. My setup is basically to install Cockpit on the host server via apt-get and then the 45 Drives cockpit-sharing plugin. This provides the NFS and Samba sharing I need and use. I host Home Assistant in a VM and Docker containers in a few LXC containers which host about 10 containers each. Then, in combination with https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ you can set up pretty much anything you need from there.
This is on in computer terms, ancient; a 13 year old Dell Optiplex 990 with 16gb Ram and software such as Authentik and Vaultwarden from different dedicated LXC containers. Never have any issues with overload of the system resources or running out of memory. It’s pretty much rock solid.
Just my 2 cents:
Proxmox. Flexibility for both new services via VM/LXC and backups (just install proxmox backup server alongside and you get incremental backups with nice retention settings, file-restore capabilities as well as backup consistency checks)
If it’s in a VM/container you don’t need to worry about backups, see 1.
In this case isn’t it sufficient to be able to access the data via Windows network?
By a backup server, is that an additional component to my proxmox install? Could I back things up to the offsite Synology? I assume it isn’t a separate box on the network?
In what ways is proxmox virtualization more flexible than TrueNas? I thought it was fairly similar for basic things (my use case). I do realize they are built for different purposes, I just don’t need a lot of virtualization.
For some reason I’ve never had luck setting up network shares for Windows on my network. I should really figure that out.
Thanks for the response. I’ll check it the backup server in more detail.
You setup Proxmox Backup Server on separate hardware and then you add it as a storage option in your Proxmox Virtualization Server.
I haven’t dived into it but I imagine you could run the Proxmox Backup Server as a VM in your Synology NAS.
https://www.proxmox.com/images/download/pbs/docs/proxmox-backup-3-1.pdf
edit: Unofficial PBS Docker github: https://github.com/ayufan/pve-backup-server-dockerfiles
Thanks for the clarification and the other information. It’s helpful.