Why is Proxmox so difficult to use?

[sniffs]

Got a Dell PowerEdge R610 server. Installed TrueNAS because it's extremely simple to use. The CPU in my R610 doesn't support bhyve VM's so I go to Proxmox.

I've spent nearly 5 hours trying to figure out how to get my 5 drives recognized by Proxmox. Found a random YouTuber that says the drives need to be unpartitioned.. Uh, alright, I guess Proxmox can't format the drives in the GUI like TrueNAS can. Would have been amazing to actually have an explanation of this SOMEWHERE.

Remove the partitions from the drives and create a ZFS pool. My drives now show up so I'm like sweet, let's create some VM's. I go to create the VM and my new pool is completely unrecognized even though when I click on my node and Disks, I can see them all there.

More hair pulling out... Why is this so complicated.

Pardon my frustration but spending hours and hours on a Saturday night for something stupid like this is frustrating beyond belief.

 

[t.lamprecht]

I've spent nearly 5 hours trying to figure out how to get my 5 drives recognized by Proxmox. Found a random YouTuber that says the drives need to be unpartitioned.. Uh, alright, I guess Proxmox can't format the drives in the GUI like TrueNAS can. Would have been amazing to actually have an explanation of this SOMEWHERE.

Re-format over gui/API would be indeed nice to have, and work is already underway to enable that. It was initially not exposed due to concerns of people formatting a drive by accident and loosing data, which we'll try to cope with by presenting as much information about possible disk use as possible.

I've spent nearly 5 hours trying to figure out how to get my 5 drives recognized by Proxmox.

Not recognized would mean that they did not show up in Nodes -> Disk? But I'd figure that they did show up there marked as used, as else a format of them would not make them show up there.
The GUI tries to show the correlation, as the usage for disks is shown in the Disk tree and ZFS create dialogue shows "No unused disk", but yes some more documentation to this would be nice to have.

Remove the partitions from the drives and create a ZFS pool. My drives now show up so I'm like sweet, let's create some VM's. I go to create the VM and my new pool is completely unrecognized even though when I click on my node and Disks, I can see them all there.

Here it's good to know that Proxmox VE storage system and PVE's disk storage management system are two different things.
The former is the actual plugin system to allow consistent access for Virtual Machines, Containers, for basic image storage features to more advanced like snapshots, clone, backups and other things like that, while working with very different storage types some shared on multiple clustered nodes, some local only.

The disk storage management is relatively new, and just meant for creating and checking up on local disks and the filesystem they use.

That's why there's an "Add Storage" checkbox in the local FS creation wizards, like the ZFS create one. It's a shortcut which automatically adds the newly created local storage as storage config entry for the Proxmox VE actual storage interface config.
It's ticked to do that by default for convenience, as most of the time one wants to do that.

If you unticked that then you can just add it now under Datacenter -> Storage, there's an "Add" menu with a ZFS entry, it should allow to select the newly created local ZFS pool as storage. Don't forget to ensure the VM/CT images are enabled as content type when doing so.

Pardon my frustration but spending hours and hours on a Saturday night for something stupid like this is frustrating beyond belief.

FWIW, I know lots of people who do not find it hard, on the contrary (after tackling the initial learning curve); but starting with a new project one did not use before is always a bit of work to adapt. Especially as there are many ways of doing things and sometimes the way one self personally expected to work does not match with the way that are provided.

Hope that helps!

 

[Dunuin]

TrueNAS is great as a NAS but crappy as a hypervisor (bhyve is missing alot of the advanced virtualization features, no HA, no clusters, very limited PCI passthrough, ...).
Proxmox is crappy as a NAS but great as a hypervisor (no GUI for creating network shares and so on).

Another difference between TrueNAS and Proxmox is, that TrueNAS is just a Unix appliance and Proxmox is a complete Linux OS. So basically you can do everything with Proxmox, if it can be done with Linux, but alot of stuff needs to be done by CLI.

If you want a nice GUI for NAS stuff you can install TrueNAS as a VM. But in that case you might want to buy a PCIe HBA that can be passed through to the TrueNAS VM so your TrueNAS VM can directly access the drives connected to that HBA without a additional virtualization/abstraction layer in between.

 

[retrojp]

I spent about 1-2 months trying to get GPU passthrough to work, and although i never got it working, i did learn a bit along the way. I still think proxmox is great regardless, and if i didn't already have a server running, i'd probably choose proxmox to run it.

 

[sniffs]

Re-format over gui/API would be indeed nice to have, and work is already underway to enable that. It was initially not exposed due to concerns of people formatting a drive by accident and loosing data, which we'll try to cope with by presenting as much information about possible disk use as possible.


Not recognized would mean that they did not show up in Nodes -> Disk? But I'd figure that they did show up there marked as used, as else a format of them would not make them show up there.
The GUI tries to show the correlation, as the usage for disks is shown in the Disk tree and ZFS create dialogue shows "No unused disk", but yes some more documentation to this would be nice to have.


Here it's good to know that Proxmox VE storage system and PVE's disk storage management system are two different things.
The former is the actual plugin system to allow consistent access for Virtual Machines, Containers, for basic image storage features to more advanced like snapshots, clone, backups and other things like that, while working with very different storage types some shared on multiple clustered nodes, some local only.

The disk storage management is relatively new, and just meant for creating and checking up on local disks and the filesystem they use.

That's why there's an "Add Storage" checkbox in the local FS creation wizards, like the ZFS create one. It's a shortcut which automatically adds the newly created local storage as storage config entry for the Proxmox VE actual storage interface config.
It's ticked to do that by default for convenience, as most of the time one wants to do that.

If you unticked that then you can just add it now under Datacenter -> Storage, there's an "Add" menu with a ZFS entry, it should allow to select the newly created local ZFS pool as storage. Don't forget to ensure the VM/CT images are enabled as content type when doing so.



FWIW, I know lots of people who do not find it hard, on the contrary (after tackling the initial learning curve); but starting with a new project one did not use before is always a bit of work to adapt. Especially as there are many ways of doing things and sometimes the way one self personally expected to work does not match with the way that are provided.

Hope that helps!

Yes, if I went to Node -> Disk, they all showed up there. However if I went down to ZFS -> Create: ZFS button, it said "No unused disks"

I've managed to remove the partition and create a ZFS share as a raidz2. In Node -> ZFS the raidz2 shows up, shows total size, shows free, shows health as ONLINE.

I now understand that to create VM's, you need to create a directory to upload your ISO's to, so I created a ZFS share and a Directory. It's a bit of a learning curve I guess but I'll get it eventually.