Thinking about switching away from TrueNAS scale to OMV

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:

  • Truenas claims a full drive for the OS, no way to partition off something
  • no automatic updates (i get why it might make sense for stability, but as a basic user i probably value the convenience higher)
  • there’ve been issues with truecharts breaking the ability to update and the solution seemed to be to just reinstall the applications
  • 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:

  • Is OpenMediaVault a good choice for me? Or is there anything better?
  • Any up/downsides compared to e.g. something like a simple ubuntu server?
  • Is there anything major that i would miss out on by not going with proxmox?
JakenVeina,

I know nothing about any of the other alternatives mentioned here, but I’ll pitch in my 2 cents that I am very happy with OMV. Haven’t had to touch it since they day I set it up, maybe 2 years ago. Except one time when I wanted to add a new SSH/FTP account for someone.

In addition to the core file services, it supports running a Docker host, in which I have running instances of Portainer (a Docker Web UI), Transmission (a bittorrent client, woth VPN support, also with a Web UI), and Plex.

rambos,

Same experience here, but keep in mind in newer updates they messed up something with docker and portainer, I forgot what exactly but switched back to manual install of portainer after that. Dont update or be prepared :)

Everething just works, I love wireguard plugin with super simple GUI.

Never tried anything else, but also never had to look any further after trying OMV

OminousOrange,
@OminousOrange@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

golli,

If I remember correctly, OMV takes the whole drive for the OS as well.

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 love the ability to really experiment with pretty much anything without impacting the services already running

I’ll probably do my experimenting somewhere else and just keep the NAS as simple as possible

Jiirbo,

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.

golli,

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.

OminousOrange,
@OminousOrange@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

SeeJayEmm,
@SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org avatar

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.

rambos,

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.

VelociCatTurd,

I have been running OMV for years and it is super stable. I rarely have to go in there. It has a lot of functionality thought the UI. My biggest gripe is that all of permissions options/ACLs combined with normal Linux permissions can be kind of confusing.

Unraid is also super simple, but maybe a bit too simple for some people. I don’t use anything but the core functionality in either one of these products. If you’re on the fence, you can do an unraid trial for 30* days (30 days, but technically you can stay on the trial as long as your disk array does not have to be restarted)

golli,

Somewhat late reply, since i didn’t have the time to start my conversion to OMV sooner. Definitely looks nice and installation was easy.

You are spot on that my first issue has partially to do with permissions. Following a guide at the time i structured my media library to some level with data sets in my zfs pool on truenas scale. But those apparently are more like filesystems rather than just directories. Which makes the whole giving permissions for my dockeruser a bit difficult (and also otherwise seems a bit less then ideal for OMV).

So since i wanted to structure it slightly different i made a new shared folder on my zfs pool and directories for my media in there and moved a few test files. Downside now is that this solution would mean that i have to move a ton of files, which would mean a ton of writes to my drives.

Apparently they changed that in one of the recent updates, but so far i really like the setup with docker compose. So much easier than the whole deal with applications in truenas scale. Copy+Paste stuff into a file, change some variables and a full stack of media applications is up and running so fast.

tvcvt,

I’m a big fan of TrueNAS and Proxmox and I think OMV will be great for you.

In the order you asked:

  • I think OMV is a decent choice, but there isn’t really a bad choice, just better fits for personal tastes.
  • The upside compared to vanilla Debian or Ubuntu is a solid web-UI for management (though you could get that in the form of Cockpit) and a complete system philosophy. The downside is less flexibility. Any system someone else makes locks you into doing things their way.
  • If you don’t have a desire to run VMs or set up clusters, or have by-default ZFS on root, you won’t be missing anything.
golli,

Thanks for such a fast and thoughtful reply.

I’ll go ahead then and try out OVM, it’s not like i’d be stuck with it forever anyways :)

tvcvt,

That’s awesome — have a great time playing around with it.

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