I was thinking Proxmox would add a layer between the raw disks and the VM that might interfere with ZFS, in a similar way how a non IT more HBA does. From what I understand now, the passthrough should be fine.
blackstrat
joined 1 year ago
The server runs Proxmox and one of the VMs runs as a fileserver. Other VMs and containers do other things.
I won't be running ZFS on any solid state media, I'm using spinning rust disks meant for NAS use.
My desire to move to ZFS is bitrot prevention and as a result of this:
Good point. Having a small VM that just needs the HBA passed through sounds like the best idea so far. More portable and less dependencies.
I'm starting to think this is the way to do it because it loses the dependency on Proxmox to a large degree.
Could this because it's a RAIDZ-2/3? They will be writing parity as well as data and the usual ZFS checksums. I am running RAID5 at the moment on my HBA card and my limit is definitely the 1Gbit network for file transfers, not the disks. And it's only me that uses this thing, it sits totally idle 90+% of the time.
Did you have atime on?
What I have now is one VM that has the array volume passed through and the VM exports certain folders for various purposes to other VMs. So for example, my application server VM has read access to the music folder so I can run Emby. Similar thing for photos and shares out to my other PCs etc. This way I can centrally manage permissions, users etc from that one file server VM. I don't fancy managing all that in Proxmox itself. So maybe I just create the zpool in Proxmox, pass that through to the file server VM and keep the management centralised there.
I'm not intending to run Proxmox on it. I have that running on an SSD, or maybe it's an NVME, I forget. This will just be for data storage mainly of photos that one VM will manage and NFS share out to other machines.
Probably helps add a certain gravitas.
Been running Ubuntu LTS releases on all my server VMs for 8 years and haven't had a single problem. Absolutely solid as a rock. Fantastic support, loads of guides to do anything. Plus you can get 10years of support as a home user with a free Ubuntu Pro subscription.
Are you saying SSDs are faster than HDDs?