Trying unsuccessfully to install PVE on new intel nuc, single disk ZFS

[rnot]

I purchased a new Intel NUC box (NUC11TNHi70L) with the intent to run Proxmox VE. It has a single 2TB SSD and 64GB of RAM. I hoped to use ZFS on the single SSD to enable snapshots.

First problem encountered, it doesn't seem like the Proxmox setup likes the video chip on this NUC. Setup starts and I can tell when it changes resolution, the video output goes away but the system is still running. Searching around, the best recommendation here is to install Debian first using the text based installer and then install Proxmox ontop of that.

I was able to do that just fine, Debian Bullseye installed and Proxmox runs as well, but I am not able to choose ZFS when installing Debian. I've used my google-fu to the best of my ability, and the few guides I find are either incomplete, or require a GUI, or are just notes and not very intuitive to follow.

Can somebody point me in the right direction to get to my end goal, Proxmox VE installed on this new intel nuc with a single ZFS disk?

 

[Dunuin]

Installing Debian on ZFS isn't that easy because Debian isn't supporting zfs. It will only support it after you installed PVE which will replace the debian kernel with the custom ubuntu kernel. So I guess you can't use the Debian installer for it. But if you just want ZFS because of the snapshots there are other options. BTRFS and LVM will nativly support snapshots too and are fully supported by the Debian Installer. And with qcow2 as format (which will even run ontop of a simple ext4 or xfs partition) you can do snapshots too. You might even prefer qcow2 snapshots because in contrast to ZFS snapshots it will allow you to jump back and forth between snapshots. If you roll back to a ZFS snapshot taken 1 month ago, it will delete everything unrecoverable that was done the last month so there is no way back once you rolled back.

And ZFS got a very big overhead, so it might not be the best choice anyway if you don't need all the other ZFS features because stuff like LVM is way more lightweight and less complex. And I guess your hardware isn't recommended for ZFS too. ZFS was designed for datacenters to be run on very stable and powerful enterprise grade servers. So hardware like very durable enterprise SSD with powerloss protection, alot of ECC RAM (because ZFS will eat up to half of your total RAM) and so on are recommended.

And I'm personally not using my zfs snapshots anymore and only use PBS backups instead. PBS backups are deduplicated so it doesn't make a big difference if I store 1 or 100 backups of the same VM, because nothing needs to be stored twice. So as long as your VM isn't changing that much doing additional backups won't really increase the backup size. And using PBS backups you got the benefit that you can freely restore any backup at any time and switch back and forth between all your backups (so like with qcow2 snapshots, but with the benefit that my backups are not stored on the same drive I loose nothing if my PVE VM storage disk dies and with snapshots everything would be lost). And I can store my BPS backups on cheap HDDs on a different machine. ZFS snapshots are a part of your filesystem so they can only be stored on that same expensie SSD so its actually cheaper to use PBS backups instead of snapshots. And snapshots do never replace a real backup, so you would need to do additional backups anyway. And Vzdump Backups in combination with ZFS snapshots consumes way more space than just doing PBS backups. So not using snapshots and only doing PBS backups actually saves me space.
And if you got no second machine running where you could run a PBS server, its also possible (but more annoying in case your complete PVE server will fail) to run a PBS inside a VM or LXC on the same machine as your PVE. But in that case you should get a USB HDD attached to your NUC dedicated for your PBS datastore so you don't loose your backups at the same time you loose your PVE and all VMs/LXCs when your SSD is dying.

Don't understand me wrong. ZFS is great and I love to use it because of all its features, but if you just want snapshots there are faster, less ressource hungy, less hardware picky and more userfriendly alternatives.

 

[rnot]

@Dunuin thank you for your well experienced opinion on this.

I found some decent instructions for installing Debian Buster on ZFS, which commented on the changes needed to install Bullseye instead. But I ran into a snag before bed last night which I haven't troubleshot yet. However, after reading your post, I think I'll try a couple of these other options, first starting with BTRFS. Thank you.

Another interesting note, I found that I was able to use Debian's graphical installer just fine, and even Debian Live works fine on this intel nuc. So maybe the issue with the Proxmox VE installer isn't video related after all. Maybe there is a way to debug the installer to find out at which point causes the screen to go blank?

 

[rnot]

Just to follow up, I ending up going with a standard Debian Bullseye install with LVM. I was able to get BTRFS working but there were a lot more manual steps and I didn't see the advantage.