Has anyone come up with this idea earlier? I really like Proxmox for the virtualization part and TrueNAS Scale for the storage solution. Best of both worlds. However, I understand that installing a HBA in the PCI express slot is recommended to passthrough the 6x discs in proxmox to the TrueNAS scale VM. This tends to be a little bit difficult given the PCB in the back of the bay which connects all the drives to the motherboard. A solution could be to remove this PCB and install SAS splitters from the RAID HBA card to the drives, but next challenge is how to power them? Is there anyone with maybe the same idea or point me in the right direction on how I could approach this? Thanks.
You can just passthrough the SATA controller.
Life can be so simple sometimes… Thanks, cannot believe it did not occur to me. Installed Proxmox, then created TrueNAS Scale VM with passed through SATA controller, worked perfectly. Many thanks!
I am trying to do exactly this, but after I pass through the ASMEDIA 1166 SATA Controller the drives disappear from Proxmox, but do not show up in TrueNAS Scale. I went into the TrueNAS shell and did “lscpi” and it shows the ASMEDIA 1166 SATA Controller. The NVME drives on the expansion sled passed through just fine.
Nevermind, I created a new TrueNAS VM and added the controller to it and all my drives showed up. Don’t know why it wouldn’t work on my original TrueNAS, but I’ll just set up a fresh install and work from there.
Nevermind again, found out when I pass an HBA connecting to an external JBOD enclosure, it breaks the SATA passthrough.
If I passthrough the SATA controller only, it works fine. If I passthrough my SAS3008 controller as well, only the drives in the external JBOD are detected properly, all the internal drives get errored out and won’t show up. Removing the SAS3008 from the passthrough fixes it, but that is not optimal since I have a total of 12 drives in my TrueNAS setup that I am trying to move over.