In my home I have 2 physical machines. One is a FreeNAS-based NAS with a ZFS array of disks and about a dozen NFS, Apple AFS, and Samba shares. It also happens to run Plex (media server) from a jail. The other machine runs VMware ESXi v5.5, and within that machine, and a few guest VMs (Windows & ubuntu).
I'd like to give myself some flexibility to use containers, and to add migration capabilities for load balancing the applications I run. I'm considering switching both machines to Proxmox v5.x
I've been reading a fair bit about Proxmox but it's still unclear to me:
I'd like to give myself some flexibility to use containers, and to add migration capabilities for load balancing the applications I run. I'm considering switching both machines to Proxmox v5.x
I've been reading a fair bit about Proxmox but it's still unclear to me:
- If I keep the VM images on the ZFS array, can that machine access them locally, and the other machine access them via e.g. NFS? Or would I configure both machines to use NFS even though one would actually do so over the loopback interface?
- Assuming I use NFS to access the VM repository, am I able to migrate VMs between the machines? What about containers?
- If both machines run Proxmox natively, what might be a good way to manage the file shares? Should I setup FreeNAS in a VM (which apparently does not work well)? Is there a decent GUI for configuring NFS+Apple AFS+Samba? I'm super fluent at the command line but I've gotten used to the error checking that FreeNAS does and it's nice to at least monitor usage, ZFS snapshots, etc. through a GUI
- Relatively speaking, should I expect Proxmox to perform similarly to ESXi?
- Minor thing: It seems it's quite complex to run Proxmox from a USB stick. I'd like to do this at least while I'm migrating, so I can reboot back to FreeNAS or ESXi if needed. Suggestions?