Input on Fileserver virtualization

rayjay

New Member
Jul 12, 2017
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Hi everyone,

since this is my first post I want to say thank you for creating a great product and for being a great community. You helped me a lot in the past and I did not have any need to register until now, so this had to be said beforehand.

Sadly, I now have some questions regarding the design of a new home setup.

As of now, I have three devices which I want to unite to one:
  • a firewall
  • a Synology DiskStation
  • a Proxmox Server
I now want to virtualize the firewall and the fileserver (DiskStation). The firewall will be no problem at all, since I have done that multiple times before. However, I am a bit stuck on how to virtualize the fileserver.
The setup of the Proxmox server as of now is:
  • Supermicro A1SAi-2550F
  • 16 GB DDR3 unbuffered ECC RAM
  • 500 GB SSD
I will add 4x 2 TB HDD which should be utilized by the fileserver. But what is the best way to do that? Since I do not have a RAID controller but I do want to have some sort of reliability, I think my options are mainly to either use ZFS with a raidz1 or to use mdadm using a RAID 5.
I think RAM could be a problem with ZFS, since I have a bunch of CTs and KVMs running, but I could easily add a small SSD for ZIL/L2ARC.

However, after that decision has been made, how should I utilize the space. Should I simply passthrough the raidz1 or mdadm-RAID 5 to a CT or KVM? Or should I generally passthrough the disks without setting up anything beforehand and maybe setup a FreeNAS-KVM which will then setup the ZFS RAID?
Or is passthrough not an option, since it is an "experimental" feature and I should do something completely different?

And after all that is done, how should I present the shares to other CTs/KVMs? Simply by mounting the shares of the fileserver via a "Proxmox-internal" network or maybe passthrough the whole bunch of disks to those too?

Would be nice to have some input on that topic, maybe there is even some "best practice" around, I was not aware of. Maybe I am kinda stuck, because I am wrapping my head around this for a few days now and I just need some other views.

Thanks for your help in advance!