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Hey, Seeing that you want to host a lot of VMs, may I suggest that you use Proxmox as the OS and Hexos as a VM. Proxmox is brilliant to run VMs while Hexos doesn't support VMs yet, you have to use the truenas gui and don't have the same flexibility as proxmox offers. Therefor, use proxmox ass your OS an Hexos in a VM. Just make sure to pass through the SATA controller to Hexos to give it HW level access and don't connect anything other then the Hexos drives to that controller. You can still just use Hexos as the OS and run your VMs in there, the initial Hexos setup is easier but you are not as flexible in the long run. There is no right or wrong in this one, both have there pros and cons. 🙂 HDDs: yes, avoid SMR drives as they are causing issues with ZFS. Go for CMR drives, but IIRC most, if not all 8TB drives are CMR anyway. Basically stay away from desktop and WD Red (non plus/pro) drives and go for NAS/Server drives. Check alternate if they still have refurbished server drives, might be a good starting point. And yes at least 3 drives now, to create a RaidZ1 which is expandable in the future. CPU: yes only AMD/Intel is supported. Intel iGPU from 12th gen onwards is brilliant for HW transcoding. 13th and 14th gen had problems where they died prematurely, but Intel supposedly fixed this with BIOS updates, but still a lot of people don't trust them, that's why some people don't recommend them. But you can still use them if you like, just make sure to use the latest bios and don't buy the F version as you mentioned. MoBo: whatever fits in the case and doesn't use a Realtek NIC. Typically ITX boards only have 1 pcie slot, so you can either use a GPU (for ML & LLM) or an Intel NIC or a HBA card. If you can go full ATX you don't have this problem anymore. Also most boards are either DDR4 or DDR5, you have to make your choice now. Almost no consumer CPU/MoBo supports ECC, so you will likely not be able to use your DDR4 EEC memory. Raid Controller: if you have enough SATA ports you don't necessarily need one. Network: wifi is a BIG no no! Neither Hexos nor Proxmox support WiFi you absolutely have to use a wired network connection, that's not optional but a hard requirement. Additionally Hexos doesn't not allow you to use your boot drive for anything else, so go with a small SSD (32GB are enough) if you use Hexos as your OS. If you use Proxmox, you don't have that limitation, there you can even install VMs on your boot drive.

I'm out of town right now but let me just state that I totally get the folks that are upset. Honestly, writing blogs is pretty stressful for me as we constantly are working on moving targets and I stress over communicating about things that are still in flux and getting the words right. Tbh, I stress over comms in general. It's nerve wrecking. It's why I am earmarking funds this year to bring someone in to handle this for us. I just didn't want to spend any money on non dev/support resources until we got to 1.0. Again, I get it and I am not gonna make any excuses for it, so if you want to be mad, please direct that anger at me, not my team. They are busting their butts to get this thing polished and rolled out.

Is it possible to back up the hexos configuration as something like a xml file? So all the settings can be backed up. Possible to automate the back up on a regular basis?

Just wanted to provide a quick update on this feature in particular. We are going to try to add this in for Q1 along with a few other big updates to be announced soon.