VM with ZFS as storage drive or add ZFS with mountpoint

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jaykavathe

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Feb 25, 2021
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I have a 15 TB ZFS on my storage and I also created a mountpoint/directory with it (because some youtube video said so).

Now I want to spin a VM with Nextcloud and Jellyfin in the same VM with dockers. I plan on passing whole 15TB ZFS to VM and let NC/Jelly fight out for space as data grows (that way I dont have to preplan split since they will be on same VM).

Question is how to allocate ZFS to this VM? Specify it as a drive during VM creation or create VM on host pool and then add/do mountpoint binding (if they are two different things).
 
Specify it as a drive during VM creation
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Seems like the easiest solution to me. This can be done with a few clicks in the GUI. You can also create additional virtual disks on your ZFS storage in Proxmox VE and attach them to your VMs.
 
Be prepaired that the backup will takes ages if you don't use PBS when using just one big virtual disk. Because every backup with vzdump will need to read the complete 15TB even if the virtual disk is mostly empty.

So it might be a good idea to create two virtual disks. One small for the OS and a big one for the media. So you can exclude the big one from backups and manually backup its contents from inside the guest.
But be aware that a backup restore will delete the existing big virtual disk if exckuded from backups.

And raid never replaces a backup.
 
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If you give all available space to one VM that hosts all services that you want to provide, why are you even virtualizing?
 
ph0x said:
If you give all available space to one VM that hosts all services that you want to provide, why are you even virtualizing?
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Yes, I aalso thought that.
I would bind-mount the mointpoint of a ZFS dataset into a LXC running a NAS OS like OpenMediaVault. That NAS LXC can then share the content of the dataset using NFS to all of your VMs. So your host and all VMs can share the complete 15TB.
 
ph0x said:
If you give all available space to one VM that hosts all services that you want to provide, why are you even virtualizing?
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Well, I have 6-7 VMs running on 1TB mirrored OS disk separate from big pool. That's enough space for most VMs. Backup is simpler for them.
But nextcloud/jelly is different, tons of data and I want it faster so whole array goes to that single VM! (I could be wrong but that's what I thought!)
 
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