Proxmox + NAS (OMV) + ZFS

[ozboss]

I know this has been asked quite a lot... I read threads all day, but still got no definitive answer yet.
The idea is to have a Proxmox VE that runs OMV as NAS solution using a ZFS filesystem.
As far as I see it there a two ways of achieving that:

First:
Passthrough the drives to a OMV in KVM and then build the ZFS filesystem with OMV.

+ OMV has direct access to the drives
- Drives/Folders have to be routed from OMV back to Proxmox so that other VMs can use them
- A lot of RAM has to be adressed to the OMV KVM

Second:
Create ZFS inside Proxmox and pass (part of ?) the vdev to OMV

+ Probably better (native) handling of ZFS
+ all the remaining RAM can be used as needed
- OMV then formats those as ext4 (which can't be any good)
- How much of the vdevs can I give to OMV so that I woun't run into any issues (I read something about like 80%)

I would prefere Proxmox to handle ZFS, so that I don't have to allocate so much RAM and I would generaly feel better about it.
Also ZFS inside OMV is done with a Proxmox kernel so this seems kind of stupid coming from Proxmox in the first place.
The best way to go would probably be to it with Samba inside Proxmox but I really want to have some GUI and I would like to run some Docker containers inside the OMV VM.

Maybe someone can enlighten me

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

you can use LXC with Debian image and install on top OMV.
Then you have what you like.
Ensure you use a privileged container with all Features active.

 

[ozboss]

Thanks @wolfgang.
This was actually how I planned on doing it at first, but I read some posts saying this is a bad idea.
I'm an absolute newbie to all this so is this the best way to do it and could you maybe tell me the actual pros and cons of the different approaches?

 

[LnxBil]

I'm an absolute newbie to all this so is this the best way to do it and could you maybe tell me the actual pros and cons of the different approaches?

"Newbie" and "best way" are often mutual exclusive. To find "the best solution", you need to specify more parameters for your goals. The LXC approach - as @wolfgang already told you - has what you like in your first post:

- native ZFS handling
- smaller RAM usage
- snapshots
- OVM stores just files
- files accessible on multiple containers without any problems (except locking...)

 

[ozboss]

Ok then so how do I bind the ZFS dataset to the container in a way that OMV can actually use it?

 

[LnxBil]

Ok then so how do I bind the ZFS dataset to the container in a way that OMV can actually use it?

In the resources tab, just add -> mountpoint.

 

[ozboss]

Yes I can mount the dataset this way, but its not actually usable in OMV. As far as I understand it OMV needs a disk to operate on, thats why I skiped the whole LXC idea in the first place. Maybe its possible to mount the dataset with iscsi but I don't know how and if that is a reasonable thing in the first place. If the whole LXC way is a good and reasonable thing it would be amazing if you could guide me through this. For now I will be going with OMV in a KVM and pass the drives as scsi, this way I can create a ZFS pool inside OMV and OMV itself seems a lot more stable this way....
I think Proxmox as a whole is amazing but maybe it makes more sense to go with Unraid for ZFS NAS + Docker + KVM.