Proxmox VE - Ceph SMB/NFS gateways integration into Proxmox (+ UI?)

[Jose Ramirez]

Hello everyone,

I have a question about Proxmox's Ceph roadmap/feature possibilities.

I understand Proxmox uses its own orchestration that does not use containers for the daemons, so I wanted to ask a "non feature request" question to know if the team is planning to bring the NFS/SMB gateways that Cephadm features onto PVECeph, specially as a value add for HCI deployments.

I've been homelabbing Proxmox ever since the you-know-who acquisition and some customers at my workplace have actually been using it for new small scale setups, but compared to vSAN and Nutanix in HCI deployments I miss the ability to get rid of SOFS for SMB, we like storing the files directly on the storage nodes since they come with built-in HA via native features.

With how much I've been loving Proxmox VE, I feel like a feature like this would allow it to each the lunch of other HCI solutions given how good Ceph itself already is, but I understand this might be very hard to implement because even Ceph's documentation recommends orchestration (I believe they actually mean containers though) for NFS and outright tells you it won't work without cephadm for SMB, so this is more of a letter-to-santa fantasy that I would love to see come true.

 

[Johannes S]

Feature requests should be filed on https://bugzilla.proxmox.com which is monitored by the developers. In this community forum it might happen, that developers miss something

 

[Jose Ramirez]

I don't mind, I didn't want to make a FR because for dedicated users options already exist, it was mostly of wanting to know if a "batteries included" option to have SMB shares straight from Ceph was being evaluated.

Looking at the bugzilla it appears someone had the same idea with RGW, so maybe I'll give it a shot to ask about NFS and SMB, thanks!

 

[maurin]

Did you tried to use ceph+ganesha manual deployment from Debian to test on proxmox ceph in your lab ? This option is Debian native and does not need to be deployed from proxmox nodes if you set ceph client + auth inside some PVE VM, from proxmox, only dedicated pools need to be created.

 

[Jose Ramirez]

Hi Maurin,

Yes I have! I have also been able to DIY a Samba + CephFS deployment, both inside VMs and directly on the host nodes, but my question was mostly regarding if it was being considered to bring the gateways as first class citizens under Proxmox's ceph, and especially the GUI. Plus in upstream Ceph, their orchestration removes the task of having to cluster the service yourself and it'd be nice to have in Proxmox.

I work at a mid sized MSP that has finally listened to my pestering to consider Proxmox as a VMware alternative, and I was curious if the team was exploring these possibilities as a value add to compete with similar bundled deals from HCI vendors that might be racing with Proxmox for VMware escapees.

If I was working at an end customer I wouldn't shy away from building a manual setup, Samba and Ganesha are certainly production ready but in an MSP setting you know how valued it is to have everything pre-packed by the vendor, and having these available from the Proxmox GUI is yet another goodie, as CLI loving technicians are sadly fading away, at least in my experience.