Proxmox: File Server: UI and Performance

[oguruma]

I'd like to build a single box to serve as a file server and VM host for several VMs.

I toyed with the idea of using TrueNAS SCALE, but it doesn't really seem like it's ready for prime time.

I'm curious how to best manage the file server aspect of Proxmox, if I decided to use it for that. I'm thinking I could install Webmin in a container, and use that container to serve as the file server. Either way, I'd use ZFS for the drives on the Proxmox host.

If I were to use LXC as a file server, with snapshots/ZFS replication on the Proxmox host in the cron, are there any performance drawbacks from a file serving standpoint versus serving from "bare metal"?

 

[Dunuin]

If I were to use LXC as a file server, with snapshots/ZFS replication on the Proxmox host in the cron, are there any performance drawbacks from a file serving standpoint versus serving from "bare metal"?

When bind-mounting the dataset mountpoints from the host into the LXC there shouldn't be any big noticably performance difference compared to bare metal. But that way SMB shadow copys won't work as the LXC has no access to ZFS features so it can't access snapshoted data. So you can use snapshots from your host but your SMB clients won't have access to previons versions of deleted/changed files/folders.

 

[UdoB]

But that way SMB shadow copys won't work as the LXC has no access to ZFS features

Good news: https://github.com/bashclub/zamba-lxc-toolbox offers a bash script to create a Container, install Samba and prepare several things like Snapshots. Those are visible as "Previous versions" from inside Windows.

You might use that script or just peek into it to learn how they did this trick; the magic consists of a few lines in the generated smb.conf. I can confirm: it works

Best regards