Architecture advise - file server - disks passthrouhg vs LVM vs other

[RasteJ]

Hello, I would like to ask you for advice. I am working on self-hosting a file server on top of Proxmox, but I am not sure what is the most reliable and secure way to achieve this. The file server should primarily serve shares to Windows clients, with support for shadow copies.

I have done some tests with TrueNAS in a VM with passthrough disks. The system is installed on a virtual disk managed by Proxmox (ZFS pool), and 2 passthrough disks are managed directly by TrueNAS as RAID1 (datastore). With this setup, I am unable to perform incremental backups of the TrueNAS datastore via PBS.

Another option I am considering is using both datastore disks as LVMs on Proxmox and attaching them as virtual disks to TrueNAS. I don’t have much experience with LVM, but if I understand correctly, this setup should allow me to avoid running ZFS on top of ZFS, and I would also be able to use PBS for incremental backups of these disks.

P.S. I am aware that another option could be using an LXC container, but I do not want to be dependent on the Proxmox kernel.

I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has personal experience with setups like this. What approach would you recommend for a reliable, backup-friendly, Windows-compatible file server on Proxmox?

 

[Impact]

My NAS is a debian CT running SAMBA. You can also just give virtual disks to a VM instead. The underlying storage is ZFS in my case. LVM-Thin would work too.
What's the issue with the kernel dependency?

 

[RasteJ]

My NAS is a debian CT running SAMBA. You can also just give virtual disks to a VM instead. The underlying storage is ZFS in my case. LVM-Thin would work too.
What's the issue with the kernel dependency?

I see the main disadvantages of using same kernel as host in same plan of updates of both. I usually do vm updates much more often than hypervisor. Also is less secure than vm.