Vagrant Box to try out TrueNAS

[lei3E]

Hi

Is there a Vagrant box to try TrueNAS on macOS / Virtualbox?

When searching this forum for vagrant, I find only threads try to run vagrant on TrueNAS.

 

[travellingkiwi]

Parallels or VMWare Fusion? or if you're adventurous then one of the free virtualisations for Mac.

Or grab an old PC and run it on there...

 

[Mlovelace]

Hi

Is there a Vagrant box to try TrueNAS on macOS / Virtualbox?

When searching this forum for vagrant, I find only threads try to run vagrant on TrueNAS.

If you search Vagrant's Boxes offerings for Freenas there appears to be a couple older versions but I don't see anything current. I would suggest rolling your own Truenas image for testing.

 

[ssbarnea]

I was looking for the same but apparently there is a lack of interest on publishing an official image.

 

[jgreco]

I was looking for the same but apparently there is a lack of interest on publishing an official image.

An official Vagrant image? Whatever for? FreeNAS is designed to run on bare metal, and even if you want to virtualize it, such as on ESXi, that begins as an ISO install just fine, and you need to provide it with a HBA or SATA controller with PCI passthru. This becomes very complicated if you try to do them under something like Vagrant. I think it'd be a support nightmare, and I say that as the guy who's probably provided more virtualization support on these forums over the years than anyone else.

 

[lei3E]

Vagrant is the best for testing / try out.

My first impression of the FreeNAS forum is that there are a lot of old white guys here who like to deal with outdated technologies.

Maybe I am wrong, but the forum gives such an impression.

 

[jgreco]

Vagrant is the best for testing / try out.

My first impression of the FreeNAS forum is that there are a lot of old white guys here who like to deal with outdated technologies.

Maybe I am wrong, but the forum gives such an impression.

[moderator note] Any further racist, sexist comments will not be tolerated. You have been warned.

As for "outdated technologies":

Perhaps you don't understand what FreeNAS is. FreeNAS isn't some virtual machine you run on your Amazon or OVH cloud host. FreeNAS is software that is designed to run on a physical machine, to manage a large number of physical hard drives, to provide storage to a local network. This is almost diametrically opposed to what Vagrant and similar technologies are fundamentally all about.

There is a certain class of software developer that finds it convenient to pretend that the cloud is just some magic thing that appears on demand to do their bidding, when in fact it is actually hosted on physical machines running infrastructure software like ESXi, Xen, KVM, and infrastructure storage systems like FreeNAS, VSAN, Nexenta, Joyent, etc. These systems are not really designed to run in a virtual machine, even if some of them can be for evaluation purposes. Your wonderful virtual Vagrant-filled world wouldn't be possible without those of us who build and maintain the very real infrastructure upon which it rests. I don't care if you feel that bare metal servers are "outdated technologies", they underpin literally everything you do, and without them, your cloud wouldn't exist.

So, also, don't be insulting.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Well @jgreco we do develop most of our own private cloud infrastructure - that runs on physical machines - in Vagrant. It's an absolutely indispensable tool for us and I can relate to the desire to try a new technology in that environment.

Having said that, @lei3E, you can create a virtual machine in Virtualbox - the default provider for Vagrant which I assume you intend to use - connect the TrueNAS install image to the virtual CDROM and configure the machine with at least 2 virtual hard disks. One for the TrueNAS install, one for the data. @jgreco is correct, though, that this is in no way suitable for production use, but you could give the product a spin and see if you like the UI and the general feel of it.

Welcome to the FreeNAS community. Yes, some of us are a bit older and we tend to tell technical facts like they are given our experience with failure if you don't. Nonetheless we give our best to help and be welcoming.

 

[jgreco]

Well @jgreco we do develop most of our own private cloud infrastructure - that runs on physical machines - in Vagrant. It's an absolutely indispensable tool for us and I can relate to the desire to try a new technology in that environment.

That's nice, but I don't see the relevance here, unless you're deploying FreeNAS instances with Vagrant. The request was for an official Vagrant image, and the purpose of a Vagrant image seems at odds with the model.

I develop a private cloud infrastructure, too, and have managed to catch a number of VMware employees off-guard who weren't aware that it wasn't necessary to have vSphere in order to automate ESXi installs.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

That's nice, but I don't see the relevance here, unless you're deploying FreeNAS instances with Vagrant. The request was for an official Vagrant image, and the purpose of a Vagrant image seems at odds with the model.

I can picture using Vagrant to do testing of FreeNAS inside of some CI/CD pipeline, so ...

But a preconfigured image does not make much sense since you can just run the installer and that gives you a much better impression of what you will be facing on real hardware.

 

[jgreco]

Well, right, but what's going to happen if there's an "official Vagrant image"? People are going to take that as a sign that such a thing is somehow supposed to be viable and sanctioned by iX and "obviously it's supposed to work that way because there's an official image." And there will be a continuous stream of kvetching here by people who don't get it and aren't willing to invest the time and effort to figure out what it's all about.

On the flip side, it's super-easy to spin up Virtualbox, Fusion, or other Mac hypervisors and install FreeNAS from the ISO, so I also don't see what the value in creating an image in a not-that-common format would be. They're not even doing OVA.

So we come back around to my original thing, it doesn't make sense for iX to offer such a thing, and so far they aren't.

 

[ealvarenga]

I have published a vagrant box for TrueNAS-SCALE 22.02.2.1. Please check it on the following link:

• https://app.vagrantup.com/ealvarenga/boxes/TrueNAS-SCALE

Or simply:

Code:

$ mkdir truenas
$ vagrant init ealvarenga/TrueNAS-SCALE
$ vagrant up

Enjoy!