Migration from TrueNas + ESXi -> TrueNas + Proxmox and add backup to LTO tapes

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theminer3746

New Member
Oct 19, 2020
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I'm thinking about migrating to Proxmox but not sure how my new architecture is going to look like yet so I would like some wisdom.
My homelab is running 2 esxi nodes with some local storage plus another TrueNas Scale server for iSCSI for both nodes as well as SMB shares for various PCs in the house.

Question 1: The hypervisor storage
I don't think I can do Proxmox Ceph as the 2 esxi nodes only support SFF drives and my TrueNas server is the only one with LFF drive support.
According to the storage guide from proxmox, my option seems to be ZFS over iSCSI for each proxmox node to access the shared storage.
However, since the zvol is going to be raidz2/mirror (haven't decided) anyway, should I be worried about zfs-on-zfs overhead?
Are there any other pitfall I should keep a lookout for/things you would like to warn me?

Question 2: The tape backup
Another question is, I scored myself a HP MSL4048 tape library with an LTO-4 and an LTO-5 drives (both FC) and I want to incorporate this into my backup solution.
A lot of people mentioned Proxmox Backup Server but I don't really understand how is it going to work in this context since most of the data is on the TrueNas box and I want it to backup both the iSCSI zvol as well as the SMB dataset.
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
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ESXi does not offer ZFS storage, this is why you need a ZFS storage VM there.

Proxmox is a Debian with ZFS preconfigured.
If you add a TN storage VM you simple put a full Debian with ZFS and SAMBA ontop a full Debian with ZFS. The alternative is a simple Proxmox where you use ZFS and add SAMBA manually. Much easier and resource efficient (TN wants 16G alone). A storage VM makes sense it you want special services from it like a special TN addon or a Solaris/Illumos based storage VM due the advantages of its kernelbased SMB server regarding ACL and simplicity. You can extend the Proxmox GUI with ZFS management by a ZFS GUI like my napp-it cs or Poolsman if you do not want to use cli zfs and zpool commands