Proxmox / ZFS / Architecture question

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

11Blade

Member
Aug 8, 2016
31
6
8
54
Noob questions on storage virtualization.

in the scenario of a Proxmox multi-VM mulit-OS machine that has multiple disks pooled in a shared ZFS array on an HBA adapter in IT mode.

1. is ZFS run/managed on its own VM and the other VM's read/write through that or does each individual VM have its own ZFS hooks/drivers to correctly read/write to the ZFS storage pool?

2. or is this all managed at the hypervisor/Proxmox level?

for instance, if ZFS has to fix some silent corruption or rebuild some files, this takes cpu and ram plus some executable - where does this happen?


my education is just starting. please excuse the naivete.

11Blade
 

ttabbal

Active Member
Mar 10, 2016
743
207
43
47
With proxmox running the ZFS pool, it's all handled on the host. You can use PCI passthrough and set up a storage VM, like ESXI users do. But if you didn't do that, it's host level.
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
3,141
1,184
113
DE
The basic question is if you want to use only the ZFS filesystem on a CLI base (this is possible directly on Linux) or if you want a full featured storage appliance with a Web-UI like

on BSD: FreeNAS, NAS4rFee
on Solarish: Nexentastor or Oracle Solaris/OmniOS/OpenIndiana + my napp-it