Proxmox using FreeNas as storage system

[nephri]

Hi,

In the past, i used both FreeNas and Proxmox for:

• FreeNas as a basic NAS system
• Proxmox with a DAS Storage using LVM (just one server at this time)

So i liked my first experience with proxmox, and now i would use Proxmox for host VM and using a FreeNas server for storage (containers + backups)

My configuration will be:

For ProxMox:

• 2x Intel E5-2670 with 112 Gb RAM
• Dual 10Gb/s Network card (Chelsio T420-CR)

For FreeNas:

• 1x Intel E5-2630V3 with 64 Gb RAM
• Dual 40Gb/s Network card (Chelsio T580-CR)
• 1 pool of 8x 3Tb SAS (mirrored by 2 + striped) + 2x SSD S3700 for SLOG (mirrored)
• 1 pool of 8x 2Tb SATA (raidz2)
• 1 pool of 4x 400Gb SSD Intel S3710 (only striped)
• 1 USB Key 32 Gb (for hosting FreeNas system)

Ideally, i would use :

• The SSD pool for the VM container
• The 8x 3Tb pool for NFS share mounted inside VMs
• The 8x 2Tb pool for backups (vm backups and others)

Now, how do you recommand to expose storage to Proxmox ?

I would be able to use pve-zsync on proxmox for snapshot VM.
But i need to make in // of the pve-zsync a snapshot for each nfs mountpoint ?

How do you handle the vm containers ?

• zfs vol on freenas exposed into an iscsi lun
• A zfs pool built on top of this iscsi lun

I suppose it should work, but i do ZFS on ZFS that seems to be a waste!
Can i expose directly a zfs filesystem from the freenas on the proxmox ?

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,
Sébastien.

 

[nephri]

I saw that proxmox has a "Zfs over Iscsi" but i didn't know if it fit my needs.

 

[ttabbal]

The closest thing I see to "expose a filesystem over the network" is NFS. I don't know if Proxmox will let you use NFS for its internal storage areas though. You might be able to if you mount it in fstab or with autofs.

Another option is to use iSCSI exports from FreeNAS and whatever filesystem you wish on Proxmox. You still get at least some benefits from ZFS without doing a ZFS on a ZVOL.

I went with an All-in-one design using Proxmox for the NAS duties as well as for the hypervisor. It works fine for me, though I do lose the nice UI from FreeNAS. I have no issues setting up NFS/SMB on Linux directly, as well as the various monitoring jobs for SMART, and ZFS.

If you are set on multiple servers, you might put a small array in the Proxmox box for local VM storage, then replicate it over to the NAS for backups. Easy enough with zfs send/recv and cron. Have the containers/VMs mount the NAS storage using NFS for all the "real" data, the local store would just be enough to boot up.

 

[Drewy]

What do you mean by "vm container", vm's, containers or both?

I export a nfs share from freenas to my promox hosts for vm storage. For containers I think (may be wrong) that you can't put these anyplace except local at the mo.

I realize some folks will probably say I should be using iscsi for my vm's storage but at the minute nfs works just fine and is plenty fast enough for my small lab environment.

 

[nephri]

i mean storage for a full vm (full virtualization).
"containers" term is for lxc storage ?