Posted by 4diii 15 hours ago
It's a set and forget OS that will run for years without requiring your attention. But these days it has decent container support for hosting services on.
Caveat: LVM does not have built-in snapshots like ZFS has.
ZFS snapshots use Copy-on-Write differently and have no such allocated space limit. Thus, we can do interesting things like snapshotting a file system after an OS is installed, and then roll back to that snapshot upon an OS upgrade failure, or even clone a new file system from that snapshot to have a different copy of the OS.
Essentially, the nature of the snapshots are different in both.
[1] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...
When a ZFS snapshot is marked, then changes to existing blocks in the snapshot as well as new writes all go to free space in the disk. There is no pre-allocated space within which these COW changes are written to.
Thus, we could have a single ZFS snapshot marked today followed by years of data being written to. This is not the intent of an LVM snapshot and the warning that I had quoted above is worth reviewing once.
I had a cloud backup (Backblaze B2, using rclone and encryption) for my home NAS. Some unlucky drive failures later, I was getting ready to recover from my Backblaze backup... and then I couldn't find/remember where I saved the rclone encryption backup.
I lost all data in that NAS, including irreplaceable personal/family photos, due to that mistake. My lesson to share: please verify you can indeed recover from backups.
Used mergerfs and snapraid, and a simple NFS share. Absolutely perfect for Proxmox backups, our pictures, media, etc, etc. No fuss, easy replacement of drives without needing to keep drives of the same size around.
I'm good with ZFS, have been for years now managing storage for $COMPANY. And I still freaking love using zfs send/receive with proxmox ;-)
But for most at home stuff: mergerfs and snapraid are just more logical.
They support ECC ram, 4 caddies, one extra PCIe slot, and to my knowledge you're not cpu limited for a zfs file server usecase.
Keep in mind though, all you need is linux* support, iDRAC, ECC if you're a snob, and drive bays ... and that's basically any free server.
In my extremely opinionated opinion I would only get used enterprise server gear, because a zfs file server will just work unless hardware fails. And a UPS.
*ZFS will be a more natural choice on FreeBSD. It's better documented, and will meet Linux 1:1 in hardware compatibility for this.
It works well enough though and has lasted me over a decade at this point. 16GB DDR3 ECC, an old 4 core/8 thread Xeon, 4x14TB drives and the Mellanox NIC.
Throw FreeBSD on it and add a couple lines to /etc/exports and rc.conf and it's a NAS right out of the box
if you are after quietness and "power" then an old workstation is a great bet. They normally have space for at least 4 fullsized HDDs, the more modern ones have lots of PCI space for nvme-ssd cards (for space) and some have lots of lanes for speed
They also tend to come with SAS/whatever remote nvme is called/SATA expnasion options
The down side is they are not as space efficient, they also tend to have 60-120watt CPUs, so expensive to run
Along with various other devices (including a large Synology which I wouldn’t buy today), I run Proxmox on a small two bay+two nvme Terramaster. I have a bare bones Ubuntu LXC running Samba configured for Apple Time Machine, an VM running Scrypyed, and PBS for Proxmox backups. Nothing on it is critical so I don’t bother with any storage redundancy.
Recently replaced the internal USB boot drive with a small NVMe USB enclosure; using a 90-degree USB connector and using a dremel to sand away an opening for the cable to come out so I could mount the enclosure externally.
Also, are there neal.* besides .fun and .computer?
I'll check all the other TLDs real quick...
For some reason people insist on doing truenas on top of proxmox and then introducing a networking layer between everything they do. Noooo…
I’m talking more about people doing the same as you except they’re linking the VM storage to another vm (truenas) over network despite it all being on same host. Think it’s mostly because people don’t want to deal with zfs via command line