ZFS based small scale configuration

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seron

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Feb 5, 2014
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In the last few weeks I've been looking into setting up a small to-the-metal hypervisor lab. It would be my first. I've looked at SmartOS and ESXi. Now Proxmox came to my attention and my interest was aroused after watching this Let's talk Proxmox video on YouTube, where ZFS is talked about, and in particular ZFS snapshots for backup.

Hardwarewise I have a HP N54L Microserver with 16GB RAM and four 3 TB disks. SmartOS requires Intel VT-X with EPT, which the N54L, having an AMD CPU doesn't support, while ESXi doesn't support ZFS. This is where I hope Proxmox will fill the gap. Do I understand correctly that Proxmox doesn't have those limitations and will allow for using this hardware with ZFS and KVM?

In order to leverage ZFS snapshots for backup I'd like to use ZFS to the metal for everything, including the Proxmox host and the VMs. For the same reason I'd like VM guests to use the the hosts ZFS filesystem to maximum extent. Is this feasible, or are there better ways to do this? Are there any guides or best practices for small scale environments such as mine that can be suggested?

I should say that I have no experience with either Proxmox, ZFS or KVM, but do use Linux extensively. This is the reason for setting up the lab.
 
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seron said:
Do I understand correctly that Proxmox doesn't have those limitations and will allow for using this hardware with ZFS and KVM?
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Yes, since that cpu has AMD-V (the intel VT counterpart). Not that I would ever recommend ESXi, but apparantly ESXi does run on AMD-V cpus, even though its not listed in the vmware compatibility list. Meaning for a testlab this should be fine.

In order to leverage ZFS snapshots for backup I'd like to use ZFS to the metal for everything, including the Proxmox host and the VMs. For the same reason I'd like VM guests to use the the hosts ZFS filesystem to maximum extent. Is this feasible
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You can do this with openvz containers (which are Linux guest only). However KVM uses disk image files. The format qcow2 does allow live snapshots of the disk image too, but as far as I know this hasn't been automated into the proxmox gui yet (am I correct?)


I should say that I have no experience with either Proxmox, ZFS or KVM, but do use Linux extensively.
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That sounds like a great baseline to get into proxmox since its not a severely limited proprietary, almost blackbox-like system (hello ESXi), but "merely" a Linux distro that comes with certain packages preinstalled, giving you almost all of the everyday tools via GUI, and more importantly, unlimited possibilities of extension and modification of the system. You can see this in the storage department. If you can connect whatever storage system you want to use to a Linux server, you can use it with proxmox.
 
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Thanks for the encouraging replies.

Seeing that installation creates LVM volumes would it be possible to have Proxmox installed on, and having it boot from, ZFS instead, and would that be a good idea?
 
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