ZFS File Share on Proxmox

[minorsatellite]

I am new to Proxmox (coming from vSphere) and slowly clawing my way through the documentation while trying to wrap my mind around some of the unique design/architectural challenges of the product. I was drawn to it primarily due to its deep integration with ZFS.

I now have my first VM running, a Windows Server VM, and am ready to move on to the second piece, where I need to provide some type network storage for the server VM. Early on I have made some ill-informed assumptions, call it wishful thinking, that I would be able to host a datastore directly on the Proxmox host (sans the guest OS) and share it out over SMB, but that is looking increasingly like a long-shot. More specifically, I was hoping to create a file share directly on the same ZFS storage where my VM zvols currently reside and make that available to any of my VMs. Having gone more deeply into the product, it's pretty clear by now that no such tooling for this functionality exists, logically, of course, because it is a hypervisor platform first. Makes sense!

Currently I only have a single pool, but even if I had that +1, it seems the only way to do this is to create another VM to serve as my network storage, where I will need one virtual disk for the guest OS, and one for the ZFS file system. I don't think there would be any advantage to creating multiple virtual disks to mimic top-level VDEV devices for my virtual ZPOOL, since I have a 3-way mirror backing the storage already? Thoughts?
If anyone has any better ideas or alternative to what I would welcome your thoughts.

Thanks in advance.

 

[IsThisThingOn]

I now have my first VM running, a Windows Server VM, and am ready to move on to the second piece, where I need to provide some type network storage for the server VM

Proxmox is not a NAS software like TrueNAS, so you won't find any nice webGUI to create a smb share.
At the same time, Proxmox is just Debian, so you can use any Debian tutorials to create a file share.
For example this.

You also can, but I would strongly advise against it, create a TrueNAS VM and passthrough disks to that VM.

Really depends on your needs.

 

[Kingneutron]

You could do a turnkey LXC file server, or if you want to be a bit adventurous just install Webmin (runs on port 10000) on the host, either one will give you a GUI to setup Samba shares

 

[minorsatellite]

Thats more or less the perspective I was looking for, thank you. I suppose that I was too close to the problem to see the obvious, which is the course of action you have suggested.

My Debian experience has flowed mostly through ZoL via Ubuntu so this seems like a pretty trivial solution.

 

[minorsatellite]

You could do a turnkey LXC file server, or if you want to be a bit adventurous just install Webmin (runs on port 10000) on the host, either one will give you a GUI to setup Samba shares

Interesting, would this approach allow me to utilize a manually created datastore (ZFS filesystem) on the primary pool?

 

[Kingneutron]

With ZFS, you could just set ' sharesmb=on ' on the dataset and it should show up as a share

https://github.com/kneutron/ansitest/blob/master/ZFS/zfs-show-my-shares.sh

In proxmox GUI you would add it as a Directory and set the Shared flag if you want to use it as Storage

 

[UdoB]

With ZFS, you could just set ' sharesmb=on ' on the dataset and it should show up as a share

Cool!

I've used "sharenfs" in the past, but never tried smb. It is worth to note that you need to apt install samba first. Without it I got this error:

~# zfs set "sharesmb=on" rpool/shared/smb-temp
cannot share 'rpool/shared/smb-temp: system error': SMB share creation failed