As the title says i am currently considering switching away from TrueNAS Scale.
My system has a Celeron N3160, 16gb ram, 2x18tb HDD as a zfs mirror and ssd storage for os
My usecase is mostly just as a local storage and media server with *arr stack and jellyfin.
Some of the reasons why i want to switch:
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Truenas claims a full drive for the OS, no way to partition off something
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no automatic updates (i get why it might make sense for stability, but as a basic user i probably value the convenience higher)
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there’ve been issues with truecharts breaking the ability to update and the solution seemed to be to just reinstall the applications
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applications sometimes don’t show up on start and i have to restart
Overall i think TrueNAS Scale might be excellent for some, but i am just not quite the target audience. So i just want something simple that works.
Now that Unraid supports ZFS that would be a consideration, but i don’t really feel like paying (however i am not completely opposed, if its the best option).
My first idea was Proxmox, but thinking about it a bit more i probably don’t need the flexibility and it just adds more levers that need adjusting.
So the current frontrunner would be OpenMediaVault for a simple NAS setup that doesn’t need as much flexibility and is low maintainance. I assume the setup would be pretty straight forward and i can just import my truenas zfs pool and install whatever docker applications i want.
My questions would be:
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Is OpenMediaVault a good choice for me? Or is there anything better?
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Any up/downsides compared to e.g. something like a simple ubuntu server?
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Is there anything major that i would miss out on by not going with proxmox?
If I remember correctly, OMV takes the whole drive for the OS as well.
I switched to Proxmox a couple months ago from OMV and am glad I did. I love the ability to really experiment with pretty much anything without impacting the services already running. I’ve been tinkering with Home Assistant, got Blue Iris on a Windows VM after Frigate wouldn’t seem to play nice for me, and have added a few other services I didn’t even know existed when using OMV. Scheduled backups are very nice as well.
It’s pretty straightforward to set up and there are lots of tutorials and documentation if you get stuck somewhere. I’d recommend it, coming from a pretty basic user with limited experience outside of Windows.
I’ll take a look into that. I know that there are benefits to that approach, but i have a limited number of slots for drives and i’d rather not use a full SSD just for the OS. I’d ideally also run some applications on the same drive.
I’ll probably do my experimenting somewhere else and just keep the NAS as simple as possible
Yeah, I’m using an old desktop as my home server/NAS, so it has enough juice for several proxmox containers and VMs. If yours is just functioning as a NAS it’s probably not worth more complexity than a single OS.
OMV supports running from a USB stick. Not ideal in all situations, but I ran it successfully that way for many years. Another option for install is to install a base Debian system and then install OMV on top of it. Both are supported install methods. I believe you can create your separate partitions as part of the deb install and then OMV only installs on the deb partition.
Please confirm all of this info from the docs as this is my recollection and I have not validated it recently.
Currently doing some digging. Seems like there is a plugin (sharerootfs) that solves the problem that you’d waste so much space when installing ovm on a ssd.
Not the person you responded to. I’m running OMV in a VM in Proxmox. This gives me the flexibility to experiment in other vms while leaving my OMV vm alone. I have no complaints, it runs great, but if your use case is 95% NAS with a few containers sprinkled on top I’d probably not go that route.
It doesnt take whole drive and they also changed some stuff recently. Im not expert but I think you install OMV by running few commands instead of OS install.