With 80+ cores and oodles of RAM, one can give a substantial number of both to the TrueNAS VM and still have plenty of resources left over for other tasks.
I originally built my Ampere box to be a beefier alternative to a MikroTik RDS2216–until they finally came out and I bought one of those too. My current testing involves identifying which of the two will be best for various storage tasks in my new Proxmox cluster as I migrate my production VMs off of ESXi. So far, it looks like high-speed storage needs (like databases and other critical VMs) will benefit from the local drives (possibility of 8 minimum on the ASROCK board), and medium-priority loads will do fine with the RDS2216 (10Gbps per drive, up to 50Gbps total for NVMEoF, according to their FAQ).
Additionally, test with exporting the RDS’s NVME drives via TCP to the TrueNAS VM (and the VM then handling ZFS tasks, such as RAID and ARC) have also been positive.
I agree. I think TrueNAS is watching to see how much demand there is for an official ARM64 port. They did feature it on their video podcast, and you had some exposure from Jeff Geerling’s videos of testing it on RPi. Some of the developer/testers have been successful in getting ARM64 containers to install on TrueNAS; it’s just a matter of tweaking the URL’s.
Personally I’d love to see someone “crack” the boot process on the RDS2216, like they did for the RB5009 to get OpenWRT on it, but with the goal of getting Proxmox and/or TrueNAS loaded. I don’t have enough personal experience with ARM64 boot processes to reverse engineer it myself, other than to try creating some custom u-boot loader that grabs another kernel and boots that over the network.
I’m running 8 of 1.92TB SATA SSDs with a stripe of ZFS RAIDZ-1 on Ampere Q64-22 as an NFS backend storage for a DGX Spark over RDMA network. Totally fine after several months.
I run several apps on my x86-64 TrueNAS system. And VM instances. And that’s crucial functionality of that OS (for me).
For quite a while I had HomeAssistant in a VM on my NAS but moved it to some thin terminal in meantime. And this is something you cannot run in a VM on Arm (they do not support it).
Yeah, and I could do it in Proxmox (PXVirt) and set up a custom file server or whatever else I want on that. It’s just that I’ve run FreeNAS/TrueNAS for years on ESXi, so being able to throw it on my big box where I threw a ton of drives is nice.
