Running Full OS alongside another image

Installation
1

I’m sure there’s tons of threads on this, I’ve seen many that don’t contain the answers I’m hoping for.

I have a powerful server that failed that I’m restoring to functionality with replacement hardware. Previously it was running Windows Server 2016 with a variety of VMs, including a pfSense router for the VMs and a VM of FreeNAS.

The NAS is to remain, the drives for it still function and should be recoverable, but neither the other VMs nor the Windows install are needed generally.

What I’m hoping is that there’s some method, maybe unraid or windows VMs or whatever, where I can as bare metal as possible run both the TrueNAS OS and the HA OS fully on the hardware to keep both systems complete functionality. It’s packing 48 GB of ECC RAM and powerful Xeon processors that I don’t want going to waste.

Hopefully someone has a suggestion I can look into that hasn’t been entirely shot down yet. Thanks!

2

You have the profile of a potential Proxmox user. With Proxmox you can run anything you like Linux and/or Windows plus if you do not mind contributing spare CPU cycles run https://foldingathome.org in Home Assistant.

You are welcome to read all my guides by visiting blog.habitats.tech. Of interest to you might be Ventoy, Proxmox, Tailscale, Pi-hole, Home Assistant, Windows 10/11, Netdata, MQTT, Node-RED, TrueNAS Scale, etc. I suggest you install Proxmox on a ZFS mirrored NVMe/SATA SSD.

I also have a guide how to setup Proxmox for High Availability.