Anyone have any advice on how to choose between TruNAS, openmediavault, etc for homelab. I want to run nextcloud and jellyfin and maybe some VMs, though I also don’t really think that RAID is the best option for future proofing but I could be wrong.
Dude that software is so tight.
Seriously though I use TrueNAS personally but I’ve heard really good things about Unraid.
Is the learning curve steep?
Unraid kicks ass, and now it has support for
docker compose
and nVidia GPUs out of the box rather than jammed into the boot sequence.Which one?
TrueNAS Core
Yeah, it seems really awesome
First think about the storage setup and how you’re gonna backup. The fruit thing comes later.
I use proxmox
Ultimately many people progress from a ready made solution like those you mentioned to more standard Linux distros as those are more flexible if you want to do something other than NAS.
OpenMediaVault is the closest to regular Debian, so if you see yourself progressing like this, it is probably the best choice for learning.
Most of those options come down to what you want from them. TrueNAS, Openmediavault, and Unraid are storage options with the ability to run VMs or Containers. Hypervisors (ESXI, Proxmox, etc) run VMs and containers, but are not really designed for storage. It gets a bit muddy since there is a lot of overlap. You could run TrueNAS as a VM on a hypervisor.
I keep things separate. My storage runs bare metal storage OS (UnRaid and another TrueNAS). My server handles all the heavy services and Internet facing services. For a homelab, go nuts. Try an all-in-one server. If you have equipment, try multiple things. I’ve ran all different storage on my server to see what I liked best. Just make sure to have routine backups no matter what options you choose. Nothing is worse than a major failure and losing it all.