How critical is the name 'local-zfs (pve1)' to the operation of proxmox VE 8.3?

[BISI_SA]

background: I am working towards migrating approx 12 clients from ESXi (the straight-up free version) to proxmox. I have been using ESXi, and ghettoVCB, to read and write to NFS, hosted on ZFS provided by FreeBSD, for close to 20 years (along with all the other stuff you can do with zfs). So I have a lot of very-effective ways of doing things that no longer work quite the same way. My experience with zfs on linux has been good, but pretty much limited to shared NFS storage for home (PVR, books, music, ad-hoc backups) and zfs send/receive operations for a colleague.

So - I've got a Proxmox VE 8.3 Community Subscription up and running on my test bed (dual CPU xeon, 265 GB RAM, no TPM). My plan (following long practice) is to have the OS boot from a boot mirror (a pair of 256 GB Samsung SSDs). I performed a default install from the ISO to the 2 256 GB SSDs, choosing ZFS-RAID1 at the appropriate moment during the install.

I also have (for my testbed) a RAIDz-1 pool with a zil partition on a separate SSD. For clients these will be enterprise-grade SSD drives. For this part of the learning curve they are a motley collection of 1 & 4 TB consumer SSDs and a never-used 120GB SSD (for the ZIL and swap). This zpool is now set up , using the command line, and visible in the webUI (Server View -> Datacentr -> pve1 -> Disks -> ZFS -> datapool0). I have not yet created a dataset on this pool, but assume it will be called datastore0.

So, in the docs I read that

The installer automatically partitions the disks, creates a ZFS pool called rpool , and installs the root file system on the ZFS subvolume rpool/ROOT/pve-1 .

Another subvolume called rpool/data is created to store VM images. In order to use that with the Proxmox VE tools, the installer creates the following configuration entry in /etc/pve/storage.cfg :

zfspool: local-zfs
        pool rpool/data
        sparse
        content images,rootdir

now obviously I'm thinking I can edit this file and replace the second line in the configuration file -- pool rpool/data -- with the new zpool and dataset on my large-enough RAIDz-1 pool.

I'd also like to zfs destroy rpool/data, since it is completely (AFAIK) redundant, and I really dislike finding unused defaults lying about to trip up future me, or my replacement.

So -- any guidance as to the pitfalls, other ways to do this, etc. would be much appreciated. Also high-value reference sections of the docs.

 

[BISI_SA]

after reading through what seems like endless posts, I have only found oblique references to not using rpool/data as my local zfs storage. And my question has morphed/expanded somewhat.

I guess the question really resolves to "is the storage name 'local-zfs' required (hard-coded somewhere), or can I use 'datastore0'?" Put another way, is this just a convention, like everyone using the pool name 'tank' (why never 'dozer'?) 'cause that's what the original documentation used for ZFS? Or is the name 'local-zfs' truly key to the operation of Proxmox Virtual Environment?

for example, a 2-year-old reddit post was inconclusive in attempting to meet the "... need to make the mountpoints match on two nodes so that I can enable replication." I am really not interested in following the OP's solution of adding a separate RAIDz-1 to a pool with an existing mirror (done that, incurred a lot of unbillable time). But the comments in the post seem to imply that the PVE replication code has a reference to local-zfs in it, rather than having configurable parameters for source/destination (but it is more likely the comments are a result of incomplete/inaccurate understanding by the posters).

• The Admin documentation, AFAICT, is silent on this matter.
• documentation for Datacenter.cfg seems to have no limitations on TARGETs or sources
• the wikii gives an alternate config example vs the Admin documentation (see below)
• The manpage for pvesr shows no sign of requiring any particular names.

Can anyone confirm or refute this?

Thanks in advance for any insights.

from the Wiki:

Configuration Example (/etc/pve/storage.cfg)
zfspool: vmdata
        pool dozer/vmdata
        content rootdir,images
        sparse

Other pages of the wiki have the same configuration example as the admin documentation.