Using Proxmox in place of FreeNAS?

[neek]

Hi, I've currently got my storage running on a FreeNAS box. I'm thinking about reconfiguring it to move the storage to be managed by Proxmox. In that setup, what do people do for a nice web GUI for managing users, shares, etc.? Run FreeNAS as a VM in Proxmox? Is there a simple Linux comparable, or a docker image, that lets one easily setup Samba, Netatalk, NFS, and iSCSI?

Also, if the vast majority of my storage is on one machine, and I add a 2nd or 3rd machine with more compute but leave the bulk of the storage on this one system, are there issues with the mismatch in performance for disk access between the systems?

And finally, if I simply install Proxmox on a USB stick and simply replace the FreeNAS boot stick with this, is there any likely risk of corrupting the RAIDZ2 cluster, so that I can test this?

My goal in doing all of this is to eventually have my boxes all running Proxmox as a VM cluster, to add a few more Docker containers while maintaining balance between my machines' resources.

thanks!

 

[neek]

Hi I'd still like any guidance any of the experts here might offer. My server arrives later this week, so any feedback is very welcome!

thanks!

 

[LnxBil]

FreeNAS and Proxmox VE have different goals:

FreeNAS is a NAS (hence its name) and is mainly for storage and directly related things like authentication (users, groups, passwords, etc.) and services to share the storage (NFS, CIFS/SMB, AFPS, sFTP, etc.). Proxmox VE on the other hand is a virtualisation solution which main purpose it virtualisation and not to share files, having users or such. You can do this of course with the underlying Debian, but this is neither something you should do on a hypervisor nor a supported configuration. Every expert on a virtualisation forum will suggest to use a VM for that, because that's what a virtualisation environment is for.

Yet to have at least on answer for your actual question: Webmin.

 

[neek]

Thanks. I'm aware they were both designed with very different goals in mind. I'll look at Webmin. In the case of using them primarily for running VMs, do experts recommend a separate host for storage? In my case the load will be light, I mostly just need to make sure it'll work without failure. I'm not worrying about having the most optimized system.

thanks again.

 

[guletz]

, I mostly just need to make sure it'll work without failure.

This could be happen in another life Any human system has the bad habit to go wrong at some point. Avery thing is not without failure. The only thing you can do is to reduce the fail probability.
For this we have HA (highly availability ) systems. So you must think at this HA sistems

 

[neek]

Fair enough, though I will say I've never had any kind of catastrophic failure with my FreeNAS box (which I really use as much more than a NAS) other than when the single power supply failed (and I had zero data loss). I guess I'll get Proxmox up and running and play with it a bit before I move many workloads onto it.