At the moment I have my NAS setup as a Proxmox VM with a hardware RAID card handling 6 2TB disks. My VMs are running on NVMEs with the NAS VM handling the data storage with the RAIDed volume passed through to the VM direct in Proxmox. I am running it as a large ext4 partition. Mostly photos, personal docs and a few films. Only I really use it. My desktop and laptop mount it over NFS. I have restic backups running weekly to two external HDDs. It all works pretty well and has for years.
I am now getting ZFS curious. I know I’ll need to IT flash the HBA, or get another. I’m guessing it’s best to create the zpool in Proxmox and pass that through to the NAS VM? Or would it be better to pass the individual disks through to the VM and manage the zpool from there?
If you want multiple VMs to use the storage on the ZFS pool, better to create it in proxmox rather than passing raw disks thru to the VM.
ZFS is awesome, I wouldn’t use anything else now.
What I have now is one VM that has the array volume passed through and the VM exports certain folders for various purposes to other VMs. So for example, my application server VM has read access to the music folder so I can run Emby. Similar thing for photos and shares out to my other PCs etc. This way I can centrally manage permissions, users etc from that one file server VM. I don’t fancy managing all that in Proxmox itself. So maybe I just create the zpool in Proxmox, pass that through to the file server VM and keep the management centralised there.
If I recall correctly it’s important to be running ECC memory right?
Otherwise corrupter bites/data can cause file system issues or loss.