ZFS as of February 2021

[rynbrn]

This has been asked many time on the forums, but I want the benefits of using Proxmox + ZFS as my OS volume in production. I'm an Intermediate level user, so I'm looking for good out of the box performance and reliability with SSDs.

It's a little more complicated for me to have a separate hardware RAID controller with LVM, but I can do that.

I'd rather boot from a ZFS pool, but I don't want to introduce potential issues by running my OS from an SSD-based ZFS pool if Proxmox isn't ready.

Thanks in advance to the experts for chiming in on this one.

 

[Dunuin]

I don't see where the problem is. As long as you use reliable hardware ZFS and Proxmox are working fine together.

 

[t.lamprecht]

I'd rather boot from a ZFS pool, but I don't want to introduce potential issues by running my OS from an SSD-based ZFS pool if Proxmox isn't ready.

What do you mean if Proxmox isn't ready?

ZFS was introduced in Proxmox VE 3.2, which was released 2014 so 7 years ago, Proxmox may even be the first open source Linux distribution providing Enterprise support for ZFS, and we continuously work with upstream on patches and issues to improve things there.

If one is complete inexperienced with ZFS one may have some learning/experimenting to do - as with all slightly complexer technology there are some pitfalls, and it's just good to have experience with basic maintenance tasks. For example, what is to do if a disk fails, is my workload such that guest get impacted when the default scrubbing schedule starts, etc.
Also planning: like the fact that using over 80-90% of available storage can start to degrade performance, and should one run a separate boot ZFS pool and one for the virtual guests' data.

But those are all on the admin side, and are not affected by the stability of ZFS, Proxmox VE or the combination together.
You may also want to check out our documentation:
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html#chapter_zfs