Proxmox FreeNAS confusion

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RobertFontaine

Active Member
Dec 17, 2015
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Winterpeg, Canuckistan
I could use a bit of defuddling, or is it unbefuddling?

I've got a fair bit of Pfsense configured and have started looking at NAS and Virtualization Platforms. I looked at FreeNAS and said to myself.... ZFS and various file serving plugins... looks good. Then I looked at Proxmox and said to myself ZFS and various file serving plugins ... looks good. I go back and look at Pfsense and it wants to provide all sorts of server functions as well.

I think I've got my sense of a firewall/router sorted in that I have it on its own hardware and I have decided that It is a firewall and any server software that I am going to run is NOT going to be on a firewall no matter how many cool features are available.

Now Hypervisor/FileSystem leaves me a little more confused. ZFS takes a boatload of RAM so if I go 24x4TB of disk on an SC846 then that is 81GB of RAM. If I load up 128GB's of RAM that leaves room for a bunch of file server containers.

Which brings me to the question... Does it make any sense to install FreeNAS as a VM on proxmox and pass through the disks to the VM? Or should I even be thinking of FreeNAS if I install and configure proxmox with zfs?
 

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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You certainly don't need all that ram for Low usage and high volume data store, start with 8,12,16gb should be fine.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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If you have Proxmox, and are OK with doing things via CLI, it will do what you need without FreeNAS.

The one part you can do with the Proxmox Web GUI is creating VMs on the ZFS storage easily.

I think if you are going Proxmox, you can get away without a FreeNAS VM.
 

K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
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If you have Proxmox, and are OK with doing things via CLI, it will do what you need without FreeNAS.

The one part you can do with the Proxmox Web GUI is creating VMs on the ZFS storage easily.

I think if you are going Proxmox, you can get away without a FreeNAS VM.
Can Proxmox provide NFS/SMB shares to esxi hosts and VMs running on other non proxmox hosts? I'm trying to reuse some of my hardware and currently have a napp-it vm with 4GB allocated RAM providing storage to the host as well as SMB shares for my workstation backups.

Can I replace it with ProxMox? I am trying to setup a new Proxmox host based on How-to Guide - Create a Proxmox VE 5.0 All-in-One with Docker It would be perfect If I had some way to expose the storage as well.
 

vl1969

Active Member
Feb 5, 2014
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Can Proxmox provide NFS/SMB shares to esxi hosts and VMs running on other non proxmox hosts? I'm trying to reuse some of my hardware and currently have a napp-it vm with 4GB allocated RAM providing storage to the host as well as SMB shares for my workstation backups.

Can I replace it with ProxMox? I am trying to setup a new Proxmox host based on How-to Guide - Create a Proxmox VE 5.0 All-in-One with Docker It would be perfect If I had some way to expose the storage as well.
Hi KD, I have been toying with similar setup myself for a while.
I have very limited needs, as in, I want a nice single node Virtualization server that can also be my file server.
since I have only one,oldish Super Micro 846 chassis, it is kind of imperative that I can do all on a single machine. been playing with many different configs in the last year.
so far the most usable solution I can see is :
Proxmox VE as HOST for all VMs, with WebMin as WebUI to manage the local storage File server.(Please do not mistake the Local Storage I am talking about with the Proxmox localStorage! this are completely different beasts altogether.)
here what I mean:
in my server, as planed so far, I will have
2x120Gb SSD for OS install. it will be a ZFS on Raid-1 Proxmox install. it maybe overkill but I like to have an option for stable machine with ability to recover the OS setup hot, on the fly. I also happen to have 2 SSD I got specifically for OS raid-1 setup. using ZFS just because Proxmox VE 4.3+ supports its out of the box.

this gives me zfs based local store for all VMs.
I also have 2x1TB spinners that I will use in zfs raid-1 setup for my image/ISO storage either as a second vDev in local store zpool or as it's own second zpool added to proxmox local store(probably the second option )

now the interesting part, I have a mix of 2 and 3 TB drives right now, some are empty and some have data(not important as I have an external backup drive with all data on it. )
so MY plan is to build out a BTRFS raid-1 pool out of all this drives (I want to use BTRFS since it is more friendly when it comes to mixing drives of different sizes) than using WebMin I will mount it and manage the NFS and SAMBA shares using this pool.
this way the Main host will be a vm server and a file server at the same time. and you can even access the local DAS using NFS and SAMBA.

PS. just need some time to get this up and running on my hardware.
did a test in nested VM (Hyper-V as host with Proxmox in VM ) seams very usable.
just need to be very careful of what I can do in WebMin so not to interfere with Proxmox but if I stick with only managing NFS/Samaba shares and the DAS data pool in it it should be safe.