Upgrade HP Microserver from XPenology to TrueNAS SCALE

17/11/2021

I've been running Synology DSM for a few years now using the XPenology loader from Jun v1.02b. This has been great for years now, but I wanted to get it updated to the latest.

I have 2 HP Microservers Gen8, an older one with an Intel Celeron G1610T and 8GB of RAM, and a newer one with an Intel i3-3240 and 12GB RAM.

I tested the latest Jun loader on my older machine which went fairly well but I had some issues and decided that it was quite a lot of research and work to get XPenology working so looked for an alternative. I wanted a NAS that would be capable of running Docker's, and the one that came out top was TrueNAS SCALE, a new offering from iXSystems which is based on Linux and can run Docker apps.

I decided to give TrueNAS SCALE a go. The install was very easy and the software will run all the Docker apps I want. The UI of TrueNAS is much more techie than Synology and seems to be aimed at people that know Linux (which I don't). The forums can be hard work because there are lots of very clever Linux people that like to assume everyone knows Linux console commands, but thankfully I didn't need to do much console work.

I use my server primarily for file storage and running Docker apps for Home Assistant, Node-RED, mosquitto, Plex, Resilio Sync, Plex. All of these installed fairly easily using either the built in catalog, or the truecharts catalog. An migration of data from one server to the other was simply a case of copying the mapped data folders from the live server to my new test server using SMB shares.