At the moment I have my NAS setup as a Proxmox VM with a hardware RAID card handling 6 2TB disks. My VMs are running on NVMEs with the NAS VM handling the data storage with the RAIDed volume passed through to the VM direct in Proxmox. I am running it as a large ext4 partition. Mostly photos, personal docs and a few films. Only I really use it. My desktop and laptop mount it over NFS. I have restic backups running weekly to two external HDDs. It all works pretty well and has for years.

I am now getting ZFS curious. I know I’ll need to IT flash the HBA, or get another. I’m guessing it’s best to create the zpool in Proxmox and pass that through to the NAS VM? Or would it be better to pass the individual disks through to the VM and manage the zpool from there?

  • BlueÆther
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    42 months ago

    I run proxmox and a trunas VM.

    • TrueNAS is on a virt disk on a NVME drive with all the other VMs/LXCs
    • I pass the HBA through to TrueNAS with PCI passthrough: 6 disk Raid z2. this is ‘vault’ and has all my backups of hone dirs and photos etc
    • I pass through two HDs as raw disks for bulk storage (of linux ISOs): 2 disk Mirrored zfs

    Seems to work well

    • @[email protected]OP
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      12 months ago

      I’m starting to think this is the way to do it because it loses the dependency on Proxmox to a large degree.

      • minnix
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        12 months ago

        Yes you don’t need Proxmox for what you’re doing.

        • @[email protected]OP
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          12 months ago

          I was thinking Proxmox would add a layer between the raw disks and the VM that might interfere with ZFS, in a similar way how a non IT more HBA does. From what I understand now, the passthrough should be fine.