Over the last few months, I’ve become concerned about TrueNAS as a product. While it does have some benefits, I can’t help but notice that it has started to feel more like a closed ecosystem rather than something community oriented. What really bothers me most is that the TrueNAS build process has become opaque and cannot easily be audited by the community. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I would prefer not to risk having something unexpected slip into my storage VM unnoticed.

Regarding my original setup, TrueNAS ran inside a VM with a PCIe SATA card passed through. While I don’t have that much data, I like using it as shared storage between my virtual machines via NFS or SSHFS. My services run in Podman containers (via quadlets) locally, and all data is then backed up to TrueNAS via rsync over SSH. When I first started I stored everything on NFS but the resource usage was too high so I ended up opting for a simpler solution. The only service that still uses NFS directly is Jellyfin; this is solely because movies and TV shows consume significant amounts of storage space.

To leave TrueNAS behind, I needed something to replace it. My original plan was simply to stand up a Rocky Linux or Debian VM running ZFS with my PCIe card passed through. However, I wanted to mix things up so I opted for a different route: instead of running separate ZFS instances inside guests, I moved my storage pool directly into Proxmox. To run storage services, I have a Rocky Linux VM that has a seperate Zvol formatted as XFS. XFS on ZFS does introduce some overhead but it still but lighter than running TrueNAS in a VM. Overall I’m pretty happy with this setup and I figured I should post it somewhere. In the future I’m looking to introduce some automation into the mix using Forgejo actions but for now everything is still rather manual.