[PVE-User] Options when installing Proxmox for NAS use

[Lagger Onesixfour]

I am not sure how it works on this mailing system, so I am just going to ask the question, provide information and hope for the best.

TL:DR I want to set up a Proxmox NAS with OpenMediaVault for movie streaming, backups and general usage, on a server with two 500GB HDDs and not sure if I should use ZFS or EXT4 when installing the OS, among other things.
Should I just bite the bullet and get a small SSD and then put the HDDs on RAID-Z1 or go with EXT4 and hardware RAID 1 with just the 2 HDDs or should I use RAID-Z1 on the OS itself when installing?
Any documentation/help about how to use ZFS properly with Proxmox? Like how do I access the volumes where VMs are stored and things like that?


I’d like to ask you guys about a few things that need clearing in my head.

Any and all advice is appreciated!

I have a Dell Poweredge T110 II with 2 high speed 500GB HDDs.

Right now, I have it set up as a RAID-Z1 with the Proxmox OS on a 16GB USB Flash drive.
That is creating many problems, the installer automatically created an 8GB partition called „local-lvm“ which is basically unused and the rest of the drive is partitioned to the OS itself.
The partition quickly gets filled up, mostly when updates occur, forcing me to remove the old kernels manually while the 8GB partition is happily sitting there doing nothing.

Now this isn’t the only problem I have with that setup, I also can’t find out how to access the files of the VMs, since they are on their ZFS volumes.
I like ZFS, I like it’s compression, bit rot protection, things like that. I just cannot seem to figure out how to use it properly, so if anyone could point me to some proper manual or a book or something I would greatly appreciate that!

People have told me that running from a USB Flash drive isn’t that much of a great idea. While Proxmox does have the Flash memory optimization, some people still experienced their drives failing after half a year or so. (I actually have the server for more than a year, but it wasn’t on all the time)

So I would like to ditch the USB Flash drive alltogether and either run the OS directly from the hard drives using either EXT4 with hardware RAID 1 or ZFS with RAID-Z1.
I am not sure which to pick and also don’t feel like that’s the greatest solution. Like I know it’s not Windows, but it still reads a lot from the hard drives, so it could potentially slow it down a lot.

I am also a bit limited in the amount of SATA connectors (I only have 2 more available), so if I wanted to add more drives I would probably have to buy a RAID card.

I also want to set the VMs up differently than before.
I used the Torrent Server from TurnkeyLinux to handle both torrent downloads (which frankly the web client sucks) and the network drive via SAMBA.

This created a lot of problems, since I couldn’t direct any other VMs to connect to it via a set path through the host, I rather had to use the network to do the same thing, just like when connecting my devices and other computers through SAMBA, which yeah ain’t that great of a solution. Also, when I tried to use NFS, I found out the kernel has it either disabled or not installed.

So I wanted to try something different.
I do like OpenMediaVault and how it handles it’s plugins and so forth.
I would be able to use it for SAMBA, NFS, Torrent, OpenVPN and many other functions together.

Yes I am thinking of using OpenVPN to connect to my home network from elsewhere. I would prefer that over a Dynamic IP address. Still no idea how to set it up.