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TrueNAS Launches Official Storage Plugin for Proxmox VE
If you use Proxmox VE and TrueNAS, I have great news for you, and it should make your day-to-day life much easier, especially when it comes to storage management: the official TrueNAS plugin for Proxmox VE is moving forward well, and a beta version is now available.
On one side, Proxmox VE for virtualization and running virtual machines. On the other, TrueNAS for storing virtual machine data. To make these two solutions communicate and allow Proxmox to access storage over the network, you have several options: NFS, iSCSI LUNs, and so on. That means you have to switch between the two interfaces to manage everything.
This is no longer the case with the TrueNAS plugin for Proxmox VE. It presents itself as a native storage backend for Proxmox VE. It is installed on each node, talks to the TrueNAS API, and allows the hypervisor to provision, "snapshot," resize, migrate, and delete VM disks hosted on the array directly, via iSCSI or NVMe/TCP. In practical terms, here is what changes: when you create a virtual disk in Proxmox, the plugin asks TrueNAS to create the corresponding zvol, then publish it as an iSCSI LUN or as an NVMe/TCP namespace. No need to go into TrueNAS anymore.
A VM Disk, a ZFS Volume
The technical benefit is especially clear in snapshot management. Let us recall the principle: when you store your VMs on NFS, each virtual disk is a large QCOW2 file placed on a network share. Taking a snapshot means working inside that file, on the hypervisor side. The larger the disk, the longer the operation takes, and the VM may suffer in the meantime. The Proxmox documentation even warns that for large disks, these operations can take "several minutes, or in extreme cases several hours".
With the plugin, the logic is reversed. Each VM disk becomes an independent ZFS volume on the array, and it is OpenZFS that takes the snapshot where the data actually lives. ZFS does not copy anything: it freezes the state of the existing blocks. The operation is therefore almost instantaneous regardless of disk size, and it only consumes space as subsequent writes occur. Live snapshots, which also capture RAM, are included.
Here are the other features included in this first version:
- VM disks and LXC containers: the plugin also manages container root file systems, not just virtual machine disks.
- Thin provisioning, ZFS compression, and resizing: volumes are created on demand and expanded after checking available capacity.
- Multipathing and CHAP authentication: enough to remain compatible with common iSCSI practices.
- Configuration validation: the plugin performs checks before deployment, and API key authentication replaces the SSH root logins that some ZFS over iSCSI setups required.
Another important point: support is currently limited to block storage. So ISO images, container templates, and backup dumps remain on NFS or SMB shares, which TrueNAS can serve from the same system and the same pool.
One caution, however: TrueNAS classifies this release as Early Adopters. It is currently being offered first to TrueNAS Community Edition users, while Enterprise support is still being validated. So make sure to test it thoroughly before moving it into production, even though it is clearly on the right track: TrueNAS has been developing this plugin since early 2026.
