Passing zfs pool to VM or CT

[Minionan]

Hi,

Did some digging but have not been able to find the solution to my issue.
I know that you can easily pass disks via the PCIe passthrough.
I know that you can pass on HBA controller via the PCIe passthrough exposing all disks connected.
But what to do when I want to pass on zfs pool created on HDD's connected to HBA with cache on nvme drive?

I'm trying to provide my FreeNAS VM with additional storage.
FreeNAS VM lives on SATA SSD raid along with all VM's.
I don't want to use that pool as a cache for HDD's pool, not to slow down services on other VM's.

I understand that I can try to pass both HBA controller and the nvme drive to create zfs pool with cache under FreeNAS.
However, in case of any issues, I would prefer to have all my disks managed and backed up by Proxmox.

Is it possible to pass on zfs pool created on HDD's connected to HBA with nvme cache to a VM?

 

[Dunuin]

I know that you can easily pass disks via the PCIe passthrough.

You can't physically passthrough single drives using PCI passthrough. You can tell KVM to to passthrough a single drive but that way the drive isn't directly passed through because it will need to use the virtio virtual SCSI controller like all your other virtual HDD.

I understand that I can try to pass both HBA controller and the nvme drive to create zfs pool with cache under FreeNAS.
However, in case of any issues, I would prefer to have all my disks managed and backed up by Proxmox.

Is it possible to pass on zfs pool created on HDD's connected to HBA with nvme cache to a VM?

No, that won't work. You should use ZFS directly on the guest instead of the host. Its better to do such things directly on the guest because the guest knows best what and when to do and the host would be blind.

 

[Minionan]

You can't physically passthrough single drives using PCI passthrough. You can tell KVM to to passthrough a single drive but that way the drive isn't directly passed through because it will need to use the virtio virtual SCSI controller like all your other virtual HDD.

No, that won't work. You should use ZFS directly on the guest instead of the host. Its better to do such things directly on the guest because the guest knows best what and when to do and the host would be blind.

Thanks for the advice. I had to go with ZFS directly managed by the guest.