New Proxmox Setup

[reynolpe]

I am new to proxmox and trying to do the following.

I have a PC with this hardware.
Gigabyte x570 motherboard
AMD Ryzen 7 3800 CPU
32GB Ram
Nvidia 2070 GPU
1 - 1TB NVMe
2 - 6 TB SATA HDD
2 - 960GB SSD

I have installed Proxmox and created a ZFS pool name tank. I have also created the mount point named media.

What I am wanting to do on this home server is run VM's and containers that can access the ZFS storage and Windows PC's on the network be able to copy files to the ZFS pool using SMB. I was going to install TrueNAS as a VM for my NAS but I'm not thinking I really need to do that because I should be able to access the ZFS that I created in Proxmox. I am going to run the usually containers (Plex, PiHole, Qumi, sonarr, radarr) so I will need thoe containers to be able to read and write to the ZFS pool. From one of my Windows PC's I can access the pool using \\<ip address>\tank_media but I can't write to it. Can anyone help me or point me in the right direction? Let me know if there is more information needed. Thanks.

 

[Dunuin]

I was going to install TrueNAS as a VM for my NAS but I'm not thinking I really need to do that because I should be able to access the ZFS that I created in Proxmox.

ZFS on top of ZFS is a bad idea because ZFS got massive overhead and that would multiply and not just add up. So either:
a.) don't use ZFS on the host, passthrough the disks in the the TrueNAS VM and create your ZFS pool inside the TrueNAS VM. Ideally you would PCI passthrough a HBA card with the disks attached to it. If you can't to that have a look at disk passthrough of individual disks.
b.) use ZFS on the host, then create a virtual disk (zvol) on top of it and use a use that virtual disks with a NAS OS that supports simpler filesystems like a OpenMediaVault VM with ext4/xfs
c.) use ZFS on the host and setup NFS/SMB shares manually using the CLI, so no VM is needed, no virtualization overhead but alos no GUI to manage users and shares

And keep in mind:
1.) you can't mount SMB/NFS shares in unprivileged LXCs
2.) you can't bind-mount a folder from the host into a VM (some exceptions like virtfs, but those aren't integrated in PVE yet)

 

[UdoB]

Just as a hint without judging the TrueNAS approach: take a look at https://github.com/bashclub/zamba-lxc-toolbox. Their Samba-Server is lightweight, it works well with ZFS datasets (no need for "tricks" like disk pass-through!) and it creates all goodies for a Windows environment, including Domain Controller functionality and "Previous Versions" of files via ZFS snapshots, accessible in the Windows File Explorer.

Oh, and after setup you can maintain Shares and Users/Groups/Computers by the native Windows RSAT tools...

Have fun!

 

[reynolpe]

ZFS on top of ZFS is a bad idea because ZFS got massive overhead and that would multiply and not just add up. So either:
a.) don't use ZFS on the host, passthrough the disks in the the TrueNAS VM and create your ZFS pool inside the TrueNAS VM. Ideally you would PCI passthrough a HBA card with the disks attached to it. If you can't to that have a look at disk passthrough of individual disks.
b.) use ZFS on the host, then create a virtual disk (zvol) on top of it and use a use that virtual disks with a NAS OS that supports simpler filesystems like a OpenMediaVault VM with ext4/xfs
c.) use ZFS on the host and setup NFS/SMB shares manually using the CLI, so no VM is needed, no virtualization overhead but alos no GUI to manage users and shares

And keep in mind:
1.) you can't mount SMB/NFS shares in unprivileged LXCs
2.) you can't bind-mount a folder from the host into a VM (some exceptions like virtfs, but those aren't integrated in PVE yet)

Yes I'm not sure why I was thinking it had to be that way. I did get it setup by running Proxmox as my hypervisor and TrueNAS as a VM with a ZFS striped disk with SMB turned on. For some reason my new Plex container would not connect to the SMB share last night but without any change it just worked this morning. Thank you so much for your guidance. I did do PCI passthrough to my TrueNAS VM and setup all the needed users, permissions and shares there. Again thank you.