I see, okay, I’ll try out containers then. So far, I’ve been able to migrate a ZFS Pool without issues, so I’ll start migrating them all, create a container that manages NFS and see if the existing Docker VM picks up the NFS shares successfully. Thank you for going in-depth and explaining everything to me. I’ve learnt a lot!

Okay, I have one of the pools that is pretty empty and has non-critical data, and I think I’ll try migrating that first, and see if it’s imported correctly by Proxmox.

About Containers, I think I’ll have to do some more research because I think I haven’t fully understood yet how they compare to VMs. Or like, when I should use the one over the other. I guess I could have a Container with a bind mount to a dataset that I want to be able to share over NFS or SMB, and handle that from whatever OS I put in the Container, right? But, I could also have a VM do that, and though it wouldn’t be able to share the data with other VMs, it can do it over NFS, can’t it? What are the advantages of doing one thing over the other?

Well, in any case, thank you for your patience, for going over each detail and taking the time to correct me where I’m wrong. I’m learning a lot, so thank you!

Edit: fixing grammar

Wow, that’s awesome. I think that’s actually the approach I’m going to go for. This way I don’t need to buy hardware, and I don’t need to work with TrueNAS anymore.

Where you talk about “walking the backups”, do you mean that you can actually see the entire file structure of the container? I mean, I don’t know how virtual disks are stored on the dataset. Like, as far as I know, a VM virtualized disk is just a file, right? So you’d have a ZFS dataset with a single file, for example? Could you then try and navigate the files inside this VM disk file, without the VM? Or did I misunderstand, and you’re mounting the dataset, somehow, directly inside the VM? Is that like a passthrough for datasets?

In any case, thank you for sharing so much information and for offering help. I may take you up on that, as it seems that this is the approach that I feel most comfortable with.

Okay, if Proxmox can handle all that, I’ll be glad to ditch TrueNAS. However, I’m afraid that I won’t know how to migrate. I’ve found this reddit thread about someone who tried to do the same thing (I think) and accidentally corrupted their pools. About skipping NFS shares, that would be a big improvement for me, but I’m very unfamiliar with bind mounts. If I understand correctly, you can specify directories that live on the Proxmox Host, and they appear inside the VM, right? How does this compare to using virtual storage? Also, how can I replicate the ZFS pools to an external machine? In any case, thank you for that info!

Wait, so if I understood correctly, you’re managing the ZFS pools directly in Proxmox, and then you have a VM that’s running docker, and using the storage that is managed by Proxmox, right? Hmm, sounds like a good solution. Is there any documentation or article that you could recommend, so that I can take a closer look? Also, how could I handle SMB shares?

Correct, they’re two separate pools, and the stripe one doesn’t contain any valuable data.

Thank you, I might raise the issue there, if I struggle to fix the issue. I didn’t know the podcasters, but now I’ll try and listen to a few episodes, and maybe I can continue learning. Thank you for the suggestion

And is it easy for the docker instances inside the VM to access the host’s datasets? About ECC, thank you for bringing it up, because I actually have no idea on the subject, and I’m sure that my current ram isn’t ECC. I’ll look into it. It could explain the issue I had with gitea, right?

Self-hosted scooter!