Advice for TrueNAS on a NUC 10 in VirtualBox with Home Assistant

[jasperwood]

I am new to TrueNAS and am looking for some advice before setting everything up.

I plan to set this up on an Intel NUC 10 (i7-10710) with 16GB Ram, hardwired to my router.

Currently, I am running a VirtualBox HomeAssistant installation and would like to continue to run off of the same NUC. From what I have read, in order to properly run my USB Zigbee stick, it sounds like I would need to keep this setup outside of TrueNAS. If this isn't the case, that could simplify things.

My thoughts are to run TrueNAS and HomeAssistant as two separate Virtualbox installs (running off of Lubuntu). My current setup of HomeAssistant is using 2 cores and 1024MB of memory so I could dedicate the rest to TrueNAS. Would something like this work or will I end up with issues down the road?

Please let me know your thoughts or if you have any suggestions on a better way to set this up. Thanks!!

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

TrueNAS will not work with virtual disks. It needs access to the disk/ssd controller hardware. Running virtualised in anything but ESXi (and to some extent Proxmox) is strongly discouraged.

What do you want to achieve running TrueNAS in VirtualBox on Ubuntu?

 

[jasperwood]

TrueNAS will not work with virtual disks. It needs access to the disk/ssd controller hardware. Running virtualised in anything but ESXi (and to some extent Proxmox) is strongly discouraged.

What do you want to achieve running TrueNAS in VirtualBox on Ubuntu?

Thanks for the help. I don't actually want to run in on a virtual disk but thought that I needed to. I am worried about how limited HomeAssistant is on TrueNas. My biggest issue with HomeAssistant is that HomeAssistant needs to access the USB for running my Zigbee stick.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

USB access can be arranged, if HomeAssistant can run in a FreeBSD jail. If it is a Linux only software that requires a VM, USB passthrough while not impossible gets more difficult.

Does your NUC have at least three disk drives? If not, installing TrueNAS doesn't make much sense. You need one dedicated boot drive for the TrueNAS system. Nothing else can go on that. And then you need at least one, better two storage drives to put your ZFS pool on (e.g. in a mirror). You can run without the mirror, but you need a boot and a separate storage drive, absolute minimum.
Second ECC memory is not strictly necessary but highly recommended.

So again: what is your use case? Why put TrueNAS on a machine that is not really designed for it?

 

[jasperwood]

I want to use my NUC 10 as I mostly use it for my Home Assistant, which is overkill. I am currently using a Synology (ds418) for network storage and media playback. The current Synology I am using is limited in its power and is very limited as a media server. It can only really host files and doesn't have the power to play 4k videos. I am trying to see if I can't upgrade to TrueNas using my NUC and adding a 4-bay hard drive enclosure (using my current drives from my Synology).

Hopefully, this explains what I am trying to do. If this could work, I will certainly look into FreeBSD and Home Assistant.

 

[Redcoat]

I will certainly look into FreeBSD and Home Assistant.

Welcome to the forums.

Look for this poster https://www.truenas.com/community/t...in-on-core-failed-to-start-ha-2022-2-0.98647/

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

External enclosures via USB don't work at all. SATA might work if you are lucky. SAS will work if you can put a SAS HBA into your NUC.

 

[ralfi31]

Hello all,

I am new on this forum and I would like to share my experience with a virtualized Truenas Scale on a NUC.
I do not agree with this sentence "External enclosures via USB don't work at all."

My setup is the following :
- last version of Proxmox (7.1-x) with IOMMU activated
- NUC8i3BEK with 32Gb RAM + 512Gb SSD NVME
- External enclosure Silverstone TS431U (connection to NUC through USB)

I have created a VM with Truenas Scale 22.02.0.1, 2vCPU and 8Gb RAM and passthrough the Silverstone TS431U.

All disks in the enclosure are correctly detected and identified individually with their model/serial shown in Truenas menu. SMART and Scrub work perfectly.

I have also experimented with a QNAP TR-002 enclosure but disks are not shown correctly so I supposed it will depend on the Sata controller of the enclosure.

 

[jgreco]

I do not agree with this sentence "External enclosures via USB don't work at all."

Come back when you've got more than fifty thousand hours on the setup and I'll consider you qualified to at least HAVE an opinion, but it will still be a horribly small sample size.

With ZFS, either things work 100.000% or they are actively hazardous to your pool and data. "Don't work at all" doesn't mean that you tried something and flames immediately burst forth, or even that you didn't manage to make it appear to work. Statistically speaking, you can sometimes get away with stupid setups, but you do not have the security and reliability inherent in a proper design, and there are lots of horror stories about misadventures ending in disasters.

 

[ralfi31]

Wow!! I did not expect such a comment.
I certainly do not claim to hold the truth, it is only about sharing a concrete case.

Anyway, everything has been working for at least 25000h (3 years) without any problems so I should be able to have half an opinion, right?

 

[jgreco]

As I said, you can sometimes get away with stupid setups. You have not (yet?) run into the fate of others who have tried USB-attached drives and run into significant issues over time. Additionally, Patrick was responding to a user who was trying a "4-bay hard drive enclosure" which have a terrible track record, so even if you've managed to attach a few individual disks and not had USB become a problem, that's not a resounding endorsement of the strategy by any means.

The community members here typically value their data and often have lots of it, and are highly focused on reliable and validated setups. We typically let people know when they've got bad setups, because a NAS and the data on it both represent significant investments in time and effort, and having the thing fail is a bad outcome that no one wishes on you.