HDD sharing/passthrough and LAN sharing

[Interceptor]

Hi,

I'm new to Proxmox after switching from Hyper-V. Sure things work totally different in comparison to Hyper-V and I'm not sure how to do what i want to do.

I have 3 drives and I don't know what storage type to choose and if i should do passthrough and whats the best way for sharing.

1. SSD1 (Proxmox installation):
Here i need a folder i can access from user1 and user2 over LAN (Windows, Android, Linux machines)
Here i want to place the media center library. I guess the best place is "local" in the node?
user1 full access , user2 read only (LAN)

2. SSD2:
Most access will be from a MX Linux VM but i also need full access from user1 over LAN (Windows).
So is it best to passthrough the SSD to the VM and share it in there?
But then all the traffic to the LAN needs to go through the VMs virtual NIC?

I don't understand yet what "shared" here means:
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvesm.html#_storage_types

3. HDD:
I need read only from a Debian Webserver VM.
I need full access from user1 over LAN (Windows, Android, Linux machines).
I need read only for user2 over LAN (Windows, Android, Linux machines).

I found 2 guides:
forum.level1techs.com/t/how-to-create-a-nas-using-zfs-and-proxmox-with-pictures/117375
tobs.tips/_doc_/ProxMoxDoc/07samba/

The first is one is doing samba directly in Proxmox.
The second is building a Debian container that is like a NAS? But why 2 NICs?
Also he writes using Samba 4 as ADC so you don't need a Linux account for every Samba account.

So whats the best way?

 

[LnxBil]

Wow .. that's going to be unnecessarily hard. PVE is a hypervisor and it is not meant to be a fileserver to mix things. You can do that, but you do not have separation or any PVE features like snapshots etc. This is a very Windows-Server with Hyper-V role thinking.

PVE works best if you have everything inside of containers or VMs, so that you can snapshot backup and migrate as you wish. You can of course do what you want, but you're totally on your own and any update can break things if something is "in the way".

First thing to ask is why do you have three different disks? Why don't you have one with redundancy and the hdd for not so fast access files and backups? Or just add another HDD to have everything at least with raid1. If you use systems with a single-point-of-failure, please be advised to have daily backups ready in order get things up again. Your setup will fail and you'll have data loss, question is only "when".

Now to your questions:

So is it best to passthrough the SSD to the VM and share it in there?

You can do that but you will not be able to snapshot or backup the VM, so why have a VM in the first place?

https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvesm.html#_storage_types

Shared among multiple nodes in a cluster, so I assume it is not relevant in this case.

So whats the best way?

Depending on your available hardware (CPU, memory, computation and storage needs I'd suggest use two SSDs with ZFS software raid for OS and fast disks (e.g. OS) and use two HDDs with ZFS software raid for slow data access. Create VMs that serve all you need, yet one VM with data for each service, e.g. a fileserver with SAMBA and different zfs data sets for the individual shares. I'd never use passthrough unless it is absolutely necessary (e.g. install on an USB medium). You'll loose so many features of PVE that you can just use it directly without any virtualisation.

 

[Interceptor]

This i at home and redundancy is not important.

Whats so special that a update can break things?
And no snapshots of the VMs with passthrough?
All the people who make GPU passthrough can not make snapshots?

The second Disk has no important data.
The third is music that is synchronized with my Workstation and only there that everybody in the LAN can listen to it.
So the HDD is for not so fast access files...
The second SSD could also be a HDD. It's only a SSD because of power saving and non moving parts.

I see allot of people installing for example FreeNAS in Proxmox?

In Hyper-V i just did a passthrough of a disk to a Windows VM and made a share in the VM.
That was running 4 Years without problems.

 

[bluesite]

you can use samba and nfs to give access to your drives over lan or mount it in a vm, that is not realy hard to do

 

[LnxBil]

Whats so special that a update can break things?

If you install stuff on your Hypervisor, this is usual on any Hypervisor, e.g. VMware ESXi. I'd only do this if you're firm on Linux and can fix problems yourself. It can work, but it does not have to.

And no snapshots of the VMs with passthrough?

Of course not, how should that work? How can you make a persistent snapshot of an USB dongle if you unplug and change stuff if your server is not running?

All the people who make GPU passthrough can not make snapshots?

They can do disk snapshots (it not passed through also), but not from running VMs like it is possible if you have only virtualised hardware. If you passthrough disks, you cannot do snapshots (neither VM nor storage).

I see allot of people installing for example FreeNAS in Proxmox?

Yes, sure. But if you passthrough disks, you cannot do backup or snapshot. Preferred way is to use a container with e.g. ZFS and you can do whatever you want and use it like @bluesite wrote. That is the way to go with a Hypervisor. You're doing virtualisation because you want everything separated by abstract layers to be able to all the fancy things like software defined storage, network, memory and CPUs.

In Hyper-V i just did a passthrough of a disk to a Windows VM and made a share in the VM.
That was running 4 Years without problems.

Yes, you can do that, but only because on Windows, there is no other way? There are more elegant, simpler and faster ways to that in PVE with Linux like @bluesite already wrote. If you do it right, you don't have as many software layers in between the actual filesystem and the disk as you wrote. LX(C) container yields the best possible performance.

If you want to use Proxmox VE and want to use all of its features, you have to use their technology. As is the same with Hyper-V, VMware or XEN. Just using the disks filled with data from another Hypervisor is not going to work with any of those "real" Hypervisor systems - e.g Windows uses NTFS, Proxmox VE uses e.g. ZFS, VMware uses their VMFS and XEN uses e.g. LVM. Totally non-interchangeable (in this example). Every technology change is the right time to swap the Windows mindset to something new. I can understand that you want to recreate the same setup you did on Windows, but you will not have an easy task and a lot of things are not going to work and in the end, Proxmox VE does not fulfil your expectations.

Again: Yes you can do what you want but it's not going to be easy, or fast and you will not have all available features of PVE due to the architecture.

 

[Interceptor]

bluesite wrote:

you can use samba and nfs to give access to your drives over lan or mount it in a vm

The only difference i get is that my idea was passthrough vs mount it in a vm?
Even if i don't know yet how this is done.