Guidance on creating simple NAS

[guts3737]

Hi all,

I currently have a mixed Windows/Mac/Linux home network all accessing a Ubuntu Server with a mish mash of services. I have a mixed bag of 3.5” drives all pooled together in LVM and Ubuntu shares that out as a Samba share.

I’d like to upgrade/rebuild the server using proxmox and separate my service groups with VM’s. The only part I’m not sure on is how best to create the NAS.

What is the best way for me to have a simple storage pool I can add/remove down the line with a mixed bag of drive sizes? Not fussed for permissions or redundancy - just max size. Will Proxmox be able to do this and have the area available to all VM’s? Or should I be creating a VM to manage it (TrueNAS?)

Thank you!

 

[Dunuin]

ZFS isn't what you want with mixed disks or if you care about expandability, so TrueNAS isn't a good choice. And PVE no NAS functionalities, so you either need to install and setup all those packages yourself using the CLI or use a LXC/VM with some kind of NAS OS that offers nice disk/user/permissions/network share management via a webUI.
You probably would be better by using something like Unraid instead of ProxmoxVE, that also can run VMs but primary use is NAS where you can dump in any amount of different sized disks.

 

[guts3737]

Thanks for the reply! I'll have a look over Unraid.

There seems to be LVM options within PVE. Would it be possible (and a sensible?) option to pool the drives together using PVE and then use a VM to share that volume out to other places on the network? If so, would it be fairly straight forward removing and adding disks to that group in PVE and seamlessly adjust the storage area using the VM?

Hopefully I'm not overcomplicating things - I'm just a lot more comfortable using PVE.

 

[Dunuin]

Everything you can do with a Debian, you can also do with PVE. So yes, you could do the same with LVM you did before with Ubuntu. But I wouldn't do that. Disks will sooner or later fail and if you got a big virtual disks spanning over all those PVs and then any of those disks fails your virtual disk will be lost. So would be very unreliable.

 

[guts3737]

Ah ok - that’s perfect. I don’t mind losing the data - it can all be easily replaced.

I currently just use the tools built into Ubuntu server - I should be able to just do the same with PVE then?

 

[Dunuin]

Both Ubuntu and PVE are based on Debian and PVE even uses a modified Ubuntu LTS kernel. So except from stuff like snap you should be able to do the same on PVE.