One VM as a NAS

[gbetous]

Hello everyone,

I'm preparing a personal server under PVE, and one VM will be dedicated to NAS storage. I have 6 HDD dedicated to this (and one SSD for boot and PVE system).

I wonder if, generally speaking, I would install PVE with all this storage (Ceph ? ZFS ?) and assign a huge size to the NAS VM, or if I would prefer to install PVE on the SSD, and make some PCI passtrhough to let the VM accessing directly to the HDD.

Thanks !

 

[Lukas Wagner]

Hey,

I'm preparing a personal server under PVE, and one VM will be dedicated to NAS storage. I have 6 HDD dedicated to this (and one SSD for boot and PVE system).

Apart from the NAS VM, what other workloads are you planning on running on your server? Do you want to store the VM disk images for the other VMs on the SSD or on HDD storage?

I wonder if, generally speaking, I would install PVE with all this storage (Ceph ? ZFS ?) and assign a huge size to the NAS VM, or if I would prefer to install PVE on the SSD, and make some PCI passtrhough to let the VM accessing directly to the HDD.

First of all, Ceph is not really an option since it is meant for clusters with at least three nodes.

Personally, I'd probably add all HDDs to PVE as some sort of ZFS pool (e.g. RAIDZ) and then assign the desired amount of storage to the NAS VM. Alternatively, since PVE is just a regular Debian system under the hood, I'd also consider setting up SMB/NFS directly on PVE - the drawback being that there is no easy GUI option available for that.

Regarding passthrough: PCI passthrough does not really make sense for SATA disks (except you have a dedicated SATA card in your machine, then you pass the whole controller to the VM). What you can do is pass through hole block devices (e.g. /dev/sda). However, if my memory serves me right, the disks will still be "virtual" in the sense that they use the virtio drivers. The NAS VM will then not have access to e.g. SMART data of the disk.

Hope this helps.

 

[gbetous]

Apart from the NAS VM, what other workloads are you planning on running on your server?

Little stuff like a personal Wiki, or an audio server. In a second step I will probably let my son manage his own VM for a Minecraft server and/or a little bit of python development : some little RAM/CPU workload, but very few I/O.

Regarding passthrough: PCI passthrough does not really make sense for SATA disks

Of course ! So yes it would be the block assignment as I can't give the whole controller to the VM.

Personally, I'd probably add all HDDs to PVE as some sort of ZFS pool

So this makes sense, yes. Thanks !