ZFS on SAN LUN(s)

[alma21]

Hi,

what are the caveats for using a ZFS Pool with SAN LUNs ? is this a supported setup for production use ? are there similiar issues as with ZFS with a local HW RAID controller (in non IT mode) ?
assumption: 1 node per zpool (no shared LUNs)

 

[UdoB]

is this a supported setup for production use ?

Well, https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvesm.html#_storage_types lists it explicitly as "ZFS (local)"!

ZFS wants to have direct access to the hardware of the devices. This has been discussed multiple times for "pass-through disks or a controller?".

Running it on a remote block device (through any protocol) would be... brave. Or simply stupid unsupported and dangerous...

Note: just my personal idea of a complex topic.

assumption: 1 node per zpool (no shared LUNs)

I am not sure what that means. But one main feature of ZFS is to have some "self-healing" features, which require redundancy - which requires multiple devices per vdev.

 

[uzumo]

Ah... that's the guy who suggested that terrifying idea.

A

Post in thread 'Shared Remote ZFS Storage'

Feb 8, 2026

regarding the ZFS/Storage HA part -> at least for smaller environments a (virtual) 2 node ZFS/iscsi/NFS Storage server (TrueNAS, DIY,...) setup with SW / LVM RAID1 within the VMs - one vm disk mirror leg on Storage Server 1 the other leg on Storage Server 2 - could be a poor man's HA solution.

• alma21

 

[alexskysilk]

Running it on a remote block device (through any protocol) would be... brave. Or simply stupid unsupported and dangerous...

Running ZFS on a obfuscated device (eg, RAID LUN) isnt dangerous per se; its no safer then any other filesystem on raid- which is to say you have no checksum correction facility at the filesystem level so you're paying the zfs tax for no gain. Moreover, write amplification tends to be larger in such scenarios so there are some capacity and performance losses.

assumption: 1 node per zpool (no shared LUNs)

Yes. that works. I would consider btrfs as an alternative as it has the same utility with lighter resource load, but pve support isnt as fully baked.

 

[UdoB]

Running ZFS on a obfuscated device (eg, RAID LUN) isnt dangerous per se

Okay, I must admit I do not know much about that scenario - I've never tried to build such a thing.

But I am fairly sure that there are more pitfalls than a new user (and me too) may expect to be present. That's why I wrote "... brave".

Not everything technically possible is recommended. But your-mileage-may-vary

 

[alma21]

the advanced idea is to have 2 (Storage) VMs in a HA pacemaker cluster running under Proxmox VE .... each of the VM has access to SAN LUNs which host one or more zpools which can failover to the other VM .... the zpools are then exposed via iscsi targets to the Proxmox VE host via the default ZFS over iscsi plugin