Openfiler as a VM doubts

[luison]

Hi. I've read quite a few posts about the pros and cons of using Openfiler (or freenas) typefile server under a VM on Proxmox VE.

In general, I understand that there is an obvious degradation of performance if this is used as a VM instead of a bare metal installation but for our small office setup we are trying to avoid 2 different physical machines. We are looking for Openfiler to serve SMB anf NFS on our local network of under a dozen of PCs and maybe also end up acting as a iSCSI ir NFS server for backups of remote servers running Proxmox VE.

What I am still not 100% with is:

- should this be done as an OpenVZ (I have the impression that kernel requirements of Openfiler make this impossible) or as a KVM?

- on a setup where the host machine runs on a disk, can I somehow give direct access to the Openfiler VM to physical disks? Does it make sense or improve performance?

- running Openfiler under a VM we loose all the benefits of creating LVM and RAIDs on it?


In general any advice on what is the "least worst" option to have Openfiler running under a VM woudl be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[p3x-749]

- should this be done as an OpenVZ (I have the impression that kernel requirements of Openfiler make this impossible) or as a KVM?

...cannot comment on this, since I am using KVM only.
Regarding the performance issues, I can confirm that OF will run with virtio-net and virtio-block drivers on Proxmox VE

- on a setup where the host machine runs on a disk, can I somehow give direct access to the Openfiler VM to physical disks?
Does it make sense or improve performance?

If you're using a HW-Raid controller, this might be the only option to make use of it, i'd think. (passing on the PCI device to the VM, I'd not recommend - if at all possible with your host - for the KVM release shipped with Proxmox)

- running Openfiler under a VM we loose all the benefits of creating LVM and RAIDs on it?

I wouldn't go that far, but all you'll get is software raid...and even with software
raid, I'd trust the host more than the VM.
I finally ended up setting my (software)raid's on the host.

I also used the hosts disks (raid or not) to create LVM disk groups to be managed for all VMs by Proxmox.
So I actually allocated host based LVMs as disks to the OF-VM.
By doing so, you'll end up with a nested LVM setup between host and OF-VM.
...haven't tried to change physical/logical volumes parameters on the host for a LVM
that is passed on to the OF-VM already, though.