Will this do what I think it will do? Will this work?

[Stereoscope]

Hi guys,

I'm trying to figure out what storage drives to buy for Proxmox and how to set everything up.

First and foremost, I know that running ZFS on top of ZFS isn't a good idea. But I want to use ZFS everywhere that I can. This means that I'll probably buy two NVMe SSDs and run them in a mirror setup. On this mirrored volume/partition whatever it's called I'll install Proxmox and all my other VMs/Containers.

However! I would like one of these VMs to be my NAS. This NAS will run on spinning rust drives which I have purchased already and I want to run these in some kind of RAIDZ setup.

Here's the question. The way I see it, whether I run TrueNAS or just an Ubuntu VM that I'll configure to be my NAS, I will need to install TrueNAS or Ubuntu as EXT4 or whatever file system TrueNAS supports that's not ZFS. This way, there is just one layer of ZFS. Then I'll create a new "drive" (that Proxmox will pretty much not manage at all) that will be composed of my spinning drives and I'll put ZFS on them. This ZFS pool will be managed by the VM which is running non ZFS but underneath, Proxmox is running it as ZFS. This way, I think I've got ZFS everywhere, and everywhere it's one layer deep.

Does what I'm saying make sense? Or am I missing something?

 

[LnxBil]

First and foremost, I know that running ZFS on top of ZFS isn't a good idea. But I want to use ZFS everywhere that I can.

It will not be fast and you may waste space, but it'll work. There is no showstopper or technical problems.
Generally, you would only have the redundancy at the lowest ZFS pool with respect to your disks. Everything on top will just be a simple raid0 (single disk vdev). I don't see any point in having added redundancy there. You will, however, not have all features ZFS is capable of, yet it'll still work.

 

[homelabenthusiast]

Hi guys,

I'm trying to figure out what storage drives to buy for Proxmox and how to set everything up.

First and foremost, I know that running ZFS on top of ZFS isn't a good idea. But I want to use ZFS everywhere that I can. This means that I'll probably buy two NVMe SSDs and run them in a mirror setup. On this mirrored volume/partition whatever it's called I'll install Proxmox and all my other VMs/Containers.

However! I would like one of these VMs to be my NAS. This NAS will run on spinning rust drives which I have purchased already and I want to run these in some kind of RAIDZ setup.

Here's the question. The way I see it, whether I run TrueNAS or just an Ubuntu VM that I'll configure to be my NAS, I will need to install TrueNAS or Ubuntu as EXT4 or whatever file system TrueNAS supports that's not ZFS. This way, there is just one layer of ZFS. Then I'll create a new "drive" (that Proxmox will pretty much not manage at all) that will be composed of my spinning drives and I'll put ZFS on them. This ZFS pool will be managed by the VM which is running non ZFS but underneath, Proxmox is running it as ZFS. This way, I think I've got ZFS everywhere, and everywhere it's one layer deep.

Does what I'm saying make sense? Or am I missing something?

I've been running proxmox with zfs and a vm truenas scale also zfs of nvme no issues at all and everything is blazing fast. On my spinning rust drives (passthrough) pool raidz1 i added log device not mirror because this is a mirrored vdisk from proxmox already usually mirrored when using dedicated device log. And i passthrough nvme as read cache. I would say my setup is well tested in terms of unexpected shutdown hundred times now because of ram issue (Waiting for ram to come lol) and everything is rock solid.