Resource icon

Resource "Absolutely must virtualize TrueNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

I've been using Hyper-V for FreeNAS/TrueNAS CORE for almost 10 years. My original host was a standalone bare metal AMD A4 in 2012 with 6 x 2TB drives in RAIDZ-2. I expanded memory, ran on an AMD A8 for a while, then moved the disks to my Alienware Area 51 with 24GB RAM and upgraded to the only Xeon 12 processor 2x6 and Windows 2016 with Hyper-V and passthrough disks. No corruption from either lost disks or from my two upgrades replacing one disk at a time with 4TB Ironwolf Pros and then 8TB recently. Works a treat. I'm now on Windows 2022 DC, Hyper-V, 32GB RAM, Proliant ML 110G9. Boot vols are 420 GB SanDisk SSD and the 6 x 8 are passed through. Only issue I have is that hyper V passthrough disks are recognised as 300 Mbps instead of 600. Makes not much difference
I've been virtualizing FreeNAS/TrueNAS for over a decade now on VMWare ESXi. The pitfalls in this document are real. The advice is solid. And what may work for you now, may not in the future. Great resource.
Top