OMV VM - best practice to handle drives (OpenMediaVault)

[tmnr008]

I am setting up a Proxmox server and will use a OMV VM (OpenMediaVault) to handle SMB/NFS shares. I have read (on this and other forums) (3) methods to handle disk.

A: Pass through individual drives to the OMV VM
B: Pass through an entire Controller and/or HBA card to OMV VM
C: Create a ZFS pool in Proxmox and assign virtual disk to OMV VM

Best practice, what is the ideal way to handle drives?

 

[Dunuin]

Best would be B as this is the only way the VM could directly access the real physical disks without any additional abstraction/virtualization layer and so no additional overhead. But C also got its benefits. For example you could migrate that OMV VM between nodes and you got the bit rot protection and redundancy of ZFS, even if you use something like ext4 inside the VM.

 

[shalak]

I understand that option C makes backups to PBS extremely trivial, right? How much storage space would be lost to the ZFS overhead?

 

[Dunuin]

I understand that option C makes backups to PBS extremely trivial, right? How much storage space would be lost to the ZFS overhead?

You usually don't want to fill a ZFS pool more than 80%. The overhead is more about performance and SSD wear.