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?
That’s what I do.
I like it better this way, because less dependencies.
Proxmox boots from it’s own SSD, the VM that provides the NAS lives there, too.
The zpool (consisting of 5 good old harddisks) can be easily plugged somewhere else if needed, and it carries the data of the NAS, but nothing else. I can rebuild the proxmox base, I can reinstall that VM, they all do not affect each other.
Good point. Having a small VM that just needs the HBA passed through sounds like the best idea so far. More portable and less dependencies.