Making a Ugreen NAS available to proxmox VM

[surfninjas]

proxmox 9.1.5

Hi Proxmox forum,

I'm a bit new to this whole world so I apologize if this question is a beginner one.

I have a Ugreen NAS set up on my network. In proxmox, I have added that NAS as a storage device (SMB/CIFS) to the Datacenter. I have created an ubuntu server VM in proxmox and I want to make that NAS available to this VM. Ultimately, I want to make a media server and I will be storing those files on the NAS but hosting the jellyfin server on the VM. However, I'm not sure how to make the NAS available to the VM.

If others here can suggest the best way to accomplish this, I'd appreciate it very much. I'm very comfortable with the command line but am just new to proxmox and self-hosting so any details are much appreciated. Thank you in advance for your help!

 

[bbgeek17]

However, I'm not sure how to make the NAS available to the VM.

Sounds like you just need to map CIFS share from VM directly to NAS. Your application may even have a wizard to do so. If it does not, add the mount to /etc/fstab https://askubuntu.com/questions/157128/proper-fstab-entry-to-mount-a-samba-share-on-boot

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Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[surfninjas]

Thank you for the quick response! Will this mount the NAS on boot?

 

[bbgeek17]

Thank you for the quick response! Will this mount the NAS on boot?

You are welcome.

That is exactly the topic of the discussion in the provided link. Note that this is an in-VM configuration, outside of the scope of PVE and this forum. There are many other discussions and tutorials on mounting CIFS share on boot.

Good luck

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Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[alexskysilk]

Ultimately, I want to make a media server and I will be storing those files on the NAS but hosting the jellyfin server on the VM. However, I'm not sure how to make the NAS available to the VM.

Realize that this creates a two system dependency for your application (jellyfin.) The correct (least dependencies) solution is to have the jellyfin container run on the nas.

https://nas.ugreen.com/blogs/how-to/install-jellyfin-setup-step-by-step

 

[surfninjas]

@alexskysilk Thank you for mentioning this. Being new to this space I am definitely interested to learn about best practices. I was viewing the NAS as a giant storage device, even though the NAS is totally capable of running the whole application. But if I understand you correctly, I should run the application and the storage of files on the same device (i.e. the NAS)? Would you mind explaining why this is best practice? I am just interested to know. Thanks for the feedback!

 

[louie1961]

I personally much prefer NFS to SMB for most things Proxmox, but there is nothing wrong with either. I tend to not make my NAS storage directly available to the VM, since 99.9% of my apps run in docker. I use the docker NFS driver in my docker compose files, and the docker apps can access storage on the NAS directly without messing with any FSTAB files, etc. My main Proxmox use case is for backing up my VMs. Because my VMs store little or no data, I really don't bother with PBS. My largest VM is 64GB. The VZ dump backups are all pretty small, say 2gb each.

https://blog.stefandroid.com/2021/03/03/mount-nfs-share-in-docker-compose.html

 

[alexskysilk]

Would you mind explaining why this is best practice?

the actual media resides on your nas. In order to have jellyfin function you need both jellyfin and the storage present; since your nas can run this function by itself you reduce the required number of devices to one by simply running the application on the storage.

The only time it makes sense to split the storage from compute is when you have more than one compute resource (cluster.)

Oh, and unless you use separate interfaces to access the storage and user traffic, you're also constraining available bandwidth by doubling the amount required (once from the nas to the server, once from the server to the client.)