Hello, quick introduction. I’m self-hosting beginner, started about year ago, burned myself couple times, learned a bit, but mostly still groping in the dark as nobody I personally know does anything like this.
- Currently I do have Asustor 2-bay NAS, equipped with Celeron 5105 processor, which I managed to installed TrueNAS Scale on to its NVMe drive, with two mirrored drives for data. I host couple services there (like Navidrome or Adguard). It works OKish, although I don’t feel like I’m very confident in TrueNAS.
- Recently I got HP Z2 Gen3 Mini workstation with Xeon 1245-v5 with 32GB RAM. Which - according to specs - should be much better “server” than Asustor above, although it does have just one SATA and one m.2 port.
My (probably not very smart) idea is:
- Use the HP as a Proxmox node with OS installed on the SATA drive.
- Host the services in LXCs on secondary m.2 drive.
- Wipe the Asustor and use it just as a network drive for “data” (navidrome music, immich pictures, etc.). Ideally accessible from other PCs as data drive. Not sure about OS choice for this use. OpenMediaVault? Plain Debian? Another instance of Proxmox? Or maybe even original Asustor option?
Is this a good idea? Considering reliability concerns or future-proof abilities. My thought process was this way I could swap either the HP or Asustor for something else in the future when the need (or device fail) appears. Or should I scratch the idea entirely and use completely different approach and/or devices?
Or maybe I should rather post this in a different community I don’t follow yet?
Personally, I wouldn’t bother wiping the asustor. There’s nothing wrong with OpenMediaVault, but it’s not any more straight forward than TrueNAS. If you’re looking for beginner simple, maybe something like HexOS or CasaOS would be more to your liking. But that makes me wonder about Proxmox for this setup. I love Proxmox and use it extensively at home and at work. It’s incredibly powerful and flexible, but it’s a lot less hand-holdy than TrueNAS. By all means give them all a try—thats the fun—but expect a learning curve before things really click.
Same here, got a TrueNAS running for storage with no services, and a Proxmox box next to it that uses the NAS for storage. Solid setup.
What made you less confident in TrueNAS? I’ve been running it for a few years now, not 1 hiccup in all that time. Granted, I never ran any other services on that box.
I meant less confident like I am not confident enough to run it properly. Setting it up with zero experience with how it works or how ZFS works was quite intimidating for me.
How do you share the storage with Proxmox? NFS or SMB/CIFS? Do you access stored data only through Proxmox or do you also connect to Truenas directly?
Setting it up with zero experience with how it works or how ZFS works was quite intimidating for me.
But you got through it, and ZFS isn’t a walk in the park for most. I think you’re selling yourself short.
As someone else mentioned, leaving truenas on the asustor and using a container orchestrator or a hypervisor on the Xeon machine sounds like a good plan to me.
For me it’s all NFS. I have storage mounted on proxmox for VMs, ISOs, backups, … I use full VMs instead of LXC, so I have direct mounts of the shares inside the VMs if they need it.
Yeah that’s a perfectly good setup and very similar to the one I use. Personally I’d stick with truenas for my software in the NAS as its perfectly good for file shares.
For getting the shares mounted on your LXCs you’ll need to use the proxmox CLI to add your shares as mount points as I don’t think the UI let’s you do it from memory though thatay have changed as I’ve not poked that part of my setup for a while.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
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