Proxmox - best practice to handle (USB) drives

[roxy]

I want to set up a Proxmox server with 1TB M.2 SATA system storage, 4 TB SATA SSD + 12 TB USB HDD as NAS storage and 18 TB USB HDD as Backup Storage. I will use it as NAS (OpenMediaVault?) and Home Server (nextcloud, home assistent, Adguard, plex, influx, grafana, vpn?, firewall? …) at the same time. I'm struggeling a little how to setup the disks. I have found different ways to do this with different methods to handle the disks.

A: OMV (CT or VM?) handles SMB/NFS shares, all other CT/VMs access the data via OMV

• A1: Pass through individual drives to the OMV VM
• A2: Pass through an entire Controller to OMV VM
• A3: Create a Pool or Directory in Proxmox and assign virtual disk to OMV VM

B: Debian lxc with installed cockpit with samba, drives accessed like in A1, A2 or A3 and mount it in other CT/VMs using fstab

C: Run SMB on proxmox itself so that proxmox handles the storage (as LVM or Directory) and

• C1: bind-mount the pve mount points of the drives directly to the relevant CT/VMs
• C2: smb-mount the drives inside of the relevant CT/VMs using fstab

I know a homeserver with USB drives is not state of the art but this is the hardware I have already and I dont need a full high available super power server. Its just for my home to play a little bit around and learn some things. It should be stable and low power consumption. The 4 TB should be available 24/7 and the USB drives if needed. One is for plex media and the other for Backup of everything (some PCs, pve itself, the 4TB SSD and 12TB)
What is the best practice, the most efficient and ideal way to configure proxmox and handle drives with which filesystem?

Thanks a lot

 

[LameDuck]

I want to set up a Proxmox server with 1TB M.2 SATA system storage, 4 TB SATA SSD + 12 TB USB HDD as NAS storage and 18 TB USB HDD as Backup Storage. I will use it as NAS (OpenMediaVault?) and Home Server (nextcloud, home assistent, Adguard, plex, influx, grafana, vpn?, firewall? …) at the same time. I'm struggeling a little how to setup the disks. I have found different ways to do this with different methods to handle the disks.

A: OMV (CT or VM?) handles SMB/NFS shares, all other CT/VMs access the data via OMV

• A1: Pass through individual drives to the OMV VM
• A2: Pass through an entire Controller to OMV VM
• A3: Create a Pool or Directory in Proxmox and assign virtual disk to OMV VM

B: Debian lxc with installed cockpit with samba, drives accessed like in A1, A2 or A3 and mount it in other CT/VMs using fstab

C: Run SMB on proxmox itself so that proxmox handles the storage (as LVM or Directory) and

• C1: bind-mount the pve mount points of the drives directly to the relevant CT/VMs
• C2: smb-mount the drives inside of the relevant CT/VMs using fstab

I know a homeserver with USB drives is not state of the art but this is the hardware I have already and I dont need a full high available super power server. Its just for my home to play a little bit around and learn some things. It should be stable and low power consumption. The 4 TB should be available 24/7 and the USB drives if needed. One is for plex media and the other for Backup of everything (some PCs, pve itself, the 4TB SSD and 12TB)
What is the best practice, the most efficient and ideal way to configure proxmox and handle drives with which filesystem?

Thanks a lot

Hi there, I'm facing the same questions just now. Did you get any recommendations? How did you set-up your system and what is your recommendation after some months of usage? Best regards Thomas

 

[Johannes S]

If you want to use something like OMV, TrueNAS or unRAID you should have a dedicated storage (for SATA or SAS) controller for the vm you passthrough see https://www.truenas.com/community/r...guide-to-not-completely-losing-your-data.212/

Otherwise the NAS systems won't be able to do their thing (managing storage). Using a LXC as nfs or samba server is a good alternative, beside using Cockpit you could also use the turnkey-fileserver from the templates or the zamba-lxc-toolbox, which uses zfs snapshots to provide old versions of your files via "Windows previous versions": https://github.com/bashclub/zamba-lxc-toolbox

I wouldn-'t setup samba on the host, if you don't have a good reason you shouldn't install additional stuff on it.

I wouldn't use USB for anything than backups.

 

[alexskysilk]

As long as your PVE box sees the drives (eg, /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc) you can do whatever you want insofar as deployment.

You can make them individual VGs, or Single VG on both, or as a zpool, btrfs mirror, or passthrough to guest if you really want OMV.

Understand that USB as a disk transport isnt very reliable, so your experience can end up not very good- and the more aggregation features you implement the more sensitive to storage timeouts it will become.

There are people who have done so anyway- you just have to be prepared for when your storage "freezes" your computer, and/or broken mirrors.

 

[DerekG]

A: OMV (CT or VM?) handles SMB/NFS shares, all other CT/VMs access the data via OMV

• A1: Pass through individual drives to the OMV VM
• A2: Pass through an entire Controller to OMV VM
• A3: Create a Pool or Directory in Proxmox and assign virtual disk to OMV VM

B: Debian lxc with installed cockpit with samba, drives accessed like in A1, A2 or A3 and mount it in other CT/VMs using fstab

C: Run SMB on proxmox itself so that proxmox handles the storage (as LVM or Directory) and

• C1: bind-mount the pve mount points of the drives directly to the relevant CT/VMs
• C2: smb-mount the drives inside of the relevant CT/VMs using fstab

I have 2x TrueNAS storage boxes, but I turned to OMV to handle drives connected via USB (currently 3x connected).

I tried multiple LXC options and ZimaOS before settling on OMV running in VM as the most stable solution with USB connected drives.
Just pass the USB connected drive through to the VM and OMV will treat them he same as internal drives. Then create the shares from OMV and have all services use those shares as their data stores. OMV is very stable so long as the drives are detected OK.

However, you should be extremely careful in using single drives as your main data store, I've seen 100s of horror stories and people having to pay out $$$$ for data recovery after storing their wedding and children's photos on a single drive which died.! That's why all my important data is on TrueNAS.