Home setup: proxmox and freenas

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dragonian

Member
Jan 3, 2020
47
30
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I'm trying to figure out a plan for a home setup for proxmox and freenas.

Eventually this will be the setup for a new home I plan to build. Since the new home has gotten delayed, I might as well figure out the server room now.
My goal would be to have one NAS and one virtualization server to store video, audio, etc connected to a A/V matrix. (+ dedicated OPNsense router)
In the past I have had one all in one fileserver/ NAS combo. This setup has evolved really only minimally since 2003.. haven't really looked at new industry/techniques for a while. I have decided it's time.

The NAS is pretty straightforward, and have it all setup w/ new hardware (Asrock D-1541 w/ 8x8TB raidz2 in Supermicro CSE-825). This is all setup, and have been migrating shares & stuff off my old file server (ubuntu with md 8x6TB RAID6). Since 10GbE is cheap now, I figured i'd test that out also.
I setup a couple of jails for experimentation, and threw a unifi controller in one. I'm not really planning on running a lot of VMs/containers in this box, the thought would be to put those in proxmox.

For proxmox the plan would be to run several VMs and a variety of containers. The key driver for the VMs would be to do PCIe passthrough for a couple of nvidia cards. My PVR of choice has been MythTv (for ~17 years), so the plan would be to run that on the virtualization server with a couple of VMs with pass though to the nvidia cards for NVDEC and HDMI audio. The containers would be the usual for Plex, home automation, etc.
I had a spare board with a i7-6700 so i loaded up proxmox and have prototyped some of this setup on it. I think the eventual plan would be a EPYC 7302P for production.
I threw a couple of old 3TB drives in an array in there for the time-being.

My biggest question is what to do with storage for the proxmox setup. I originally thought that I would like all of the storage on the freeNAS box, and host the drives for VMs and CTs on there. From what I have read it doesn't look like there is a straight-forward approach for that.

My 1st thought was to do iSCSI, but it appears that I cannot host filesystems for the containers that way. I also understand that I would need to have a ZIL/SLOG for freenas to have reasonable block performance.
My 2nd thought was maybe just do a couple of SSDs for a mirrored zfs vdev in the proxmox box, and backup/replicate those to the freenas box.

I looked at Ceph, but I don't have any desire to have any more boxes/ redundancy. I have to remember this is a home setup :)

Any thoughts?
 

86turbodsl

Member
Feb 24, 2020
34
4
8
Interested to see what you come up with. I"ve run Myth for 18 years and am putting together a similar system with proxmox and trying to decide on myth on the bare metal with debian 10 and addon proxmox vs. proxmox and myth in a vm with pci passthru for the tuners. It's a dilemma.