ZFS on Proxmox and VM

[showiproute]

Hi there,

as the title says I am using ZFS on Proxmox as well as within VMs.
Is this a good decision or not a common practice?

My basic intention why I have started using ZFS within my VM was that it offers compression which is a nice feature for my Nextcloud storage.

And to be honest: I am really new to ZFS filesystem. Formerly I was using either xts on CentOS or ext4 on Ubuntu VMs

 

[Dunuin]

My basic intention why I have started using ZFS within my VM was that it offers compression which is a nice feature for my Nextcloud storage.

ZFSs compression works on block level. As long as your VMs virtual disks are stored on a ZFS pool everything should be compressed. Including guests file systems like ext4. I only use ext4 inside of VMs and if I run "zfs get compressratio" I see compression of factor 1.09 to 3.7x.

ZFS inside guests sounds like alot of overhead and wasted RAM.

 

[apoc]

Zfs on top of zfs? Typically having intelligence on top of intelligence isn't a good idea. I am using zfs in VMS as well, but those have raw access to some dedicated disks.

 

[ertanerbek]

Hi there,

as the title says I am using ZFS on Proxmox as well as within VMs.
Is this a good decision or not a common practice?

My basic intention why I have started using ZFS within my VM was that it offers compression which is a nice feature for my Nextcloud storage.

And to be honest: I am really new to ZFS filesystem. Formerly I was using either xts on CentOS or ext4 on Ubuntu VMs

Best practic is do not use local storage on Host side because hyperconverged bull shit on real usage... On Vmware side, firstly Vmware suggest to all if you will use hyperconnverged solition with VSAN please sparate your VSAN node from Guest nde other wise you can not be sure about services quality . Secondly people only think Linux use RAM for Guest but actually no; Linux also use your RAM as Disk Buffer and Disk Write Through cache then if you will use your Host ram for Write Back cache for your Disk then Guest or Host will start RAM usage problem or IO problem..

So if you need compression and deduplication use on your GUEST use ZFS or BTRF on Guest operation system then you will be sure our services ever time will continue correctly..

For your home lab, what youw ant you can use but for real usage use on guest, this is my suggestion

 

[showiproute]

Best practic is do not use local storage on Host side because hyperconverged bull shit on real usage... On Vmware side, firstly Vmware suggest to all if you will use hyperconnverged solition with VSAN please sparate your VSAN node from Guest nde other wise you can not be sure about services quality . Secondly people only think Linux use RAM for Guest but actually no; Linux also use your RAM as Disk Buffer and Disk Write Through cache then if you will use your Host ram for Write Back cache for your Disk then Guest or Host will start RAM usage problem or IO problem..

So if you need compression and deduplication use on your GUEST use ZFS or BTRF on Guest operation system then you will be sure our services ever time will continue correctly..

For your home lab, what youw ant you can use but for real usage use on guest, this is my suggestion

I have kind of a "standard" server:
A single socket CPU, 128 GB RAM, a few HDDs, a few SSDs.
Proxmox as hypervisor running a couple of VMs.

 

[Jannoke]

Putting this as experience - i did see around 2x worse compression ratio if guest system would use xfs and it would be put on zfs storage in proxmox.
Just making and LVM storage on proxmox and using zfs in geuest yealded around 2x better compression. This difference comes probably because of alignment of zfs vs xfs blocksizes.