Moving From FreeNAS to Proxmox

[Maka]

Hello All,

I'm new to Proxmox but have used FreeNAS for a few years. I'm making the move because I need a better virtualization platform than FreeNAS could provide but I also didn't want to give up ZFS.

I've got Proxmox installed on a USB drive and was able to import my two existing ZFS pools from FreeNAS without issue (very happy about that). With FreeNAS I just shared the entire pool to my home network and didn't bother much with datasets or Zvols; it's probably poorly configured in that respect but it's just built up this way over the years I guess. I've been following some online guides about running a turnkey file server container as being the best route rather than installing samba on proxmox and sharing my volume directory that way. I did ZFS create for ISO, Image, and storage but none of my data are in those so I added the entire pool to the node as a directory that I'd like to share via this container. I've read that this shouldn't be done for actually running VMs but I won't be using it like this; it will only be for sharing out the directories that are already existing for my files.

When you set up the mount point on the container you need to specify a size - should this just be the size of the entire pool?

Also, is this a terrible idea in some fashion? I know it's probably not an ideal way to do things but it's just the way the directory structure on the pool was done from the start. For example, I have a folder on the main pool for software and ISOs but it's just a folder not a dataset. I assume Proxmox won't be able to use the ISOs there but I can copy them if necessary later.

Thanks!

 

[Maka]

No one has shared the entire pool to a container before? I figured others migrating from a previous ZFS install would have had the same idea?

Do I need to add the pool as a directory?
Can the entire pool be shared as a directory when datasets within the pool (created with the ZFS create command) are also exposed as ZFS storage to Proxmox? Assuming no VMs will be run from the directory share and only from the ZFS type datasets.

Thanks,

 

[Maka]

I added a bind mount point to the turnkey fileserver container config file and was able to get Samba to share the entire pool out. Quirky or unexpected results followed where two similar directories on the pool /volume were visible but one had files and the other didn't; neither of these directories had been added to Proxmox and don't appear as mount points with zfs list. However, everything within the folders is visible to Proxmox via SSH; permissions as shown on the Proxmox box are identical.

I'd like this to be a stable and supported configuration and to not have to scratch my head about things going forward so I'm going to do a bit of digging on the following two options:
1) Use ZFS create command to create a new folder / mountpoint on the main pool and then manually move all of the existing directories I want to share into it and then share that with the container.
2) Use the ZFS set mountpoint command for the existing directories on the main pool and share the directories out individually to the container.

Sorry if this all seems dumb but I'm just getting back into this after years of not having to think about it.

I'll post back with what I scrounge up.

Thanks,