[SOLVED] ZFS without RAID?

Bugbear

Member
Dec 29, 2020
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Hi!

I'm really wondering why the Proxmox Installation Wizard doesn't offer an option for ZFS without any RAID(Z) setup.
Some benefits of ZFS rely heavily on RAID(Z), but many don't: Copy-on-write, integrity checksums, snapshot features, deduplication, native block-level encryption, etc.

Personally I'd like to do full-disk-encryption without RAID(Z) but I'm not sure how. Do I need to install Debian with ZFS and manually setup PVE on top of it?
Any ideas are well appreciated! Cheers!
 
You can install Proxmox with ZFS on a single drive without RAID but with all the features of ZFS (although it might be called RAID0, since there is no redundancy).
I don't know how to do encryption with the root ZFS pool but there are threads about that on this forum.
 
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I would have never thought of this :O Thank you so much @leesteken!
Yeah ... of course it should be possible to do technically "RAID0" striping accross only one drive ... Genius ...
Cheers!
 
Full-disk encryption with ZFS works fine with single hosts but keep in mind that neither migrating between nodes of a cluster will work not cross-cluster migration. And PVE isn't supporting any encryption, so you have to add that later yourself.
 
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@Dunuin Ok, noted! However currently I have not (yet ..?.) got around to using clustering.

PS: Applying ZFS encryption manually on top of PVE doesn't seem that hard, e.g. this guide.
 
I would have never thought of this :O Thank you so much @leesteken!
Yeah ... of course it should be possible to do technically "RAID0" striping accross only one drive ... Genius ...
Cheers!
Let me chime in. I did install raid-1 on a single NVME drive, and later on added another drive into the raid-set. Worked as a charm using some advise from another forum member (https://forum.proxmox.com/members/dunuin.96080/)

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/how-to-add-new-disk-to-zfs-pool.99902/#post-585995
 
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