I like my Kubernetes setup at work. It runs Nextcloud, Mattermost, GitLab, company website, several embedded firmware OTA update sites, a few internal apps. Nextcloud was pretty easy to install on it with Helm, just a single command line and a yaml file to specify domain, settings, etc. I had some teething issues in my early setup where the database would get wiped inexplicably, but it’s been running smooth for years now. (Yes, I know, bad juju running databases on Kubernetes…I’m used to it and it mostly works)
I wouldn’t, you’ll lose a lot not having it manage the disks such as using dissimilar disks for the array and having it spin down unused disks. You might be able to pass disks through so the unraid VM can manage them directly, but it might be harder than I’d personally want to deal with.
If you aren’t running VMs much. Truenas scale I believe can do docker well. I’ve seen a lot of people put that in a VM on proxmox with disks passed through to be used as the NAS portion.
If you virtualize unraid, unraid wont have direct drive access - you can get around this by getting an HBA card and forwarding that to the unraid VM. Others have mentioned that proxmox doesn’t have docker support, I personally run docker containers within lxc boxes on proxmox. There are solutions to make managing containers easier, like portainer, if you want to go down that route.
After Ai watched Lempa’s video virtualizing TrueNAS passing through all drives on ProxMox, I started searching to see if anyone had tried the same with UnRaid, and TechHut actually did it.
However, my use case is somewhat different than his, and he’s just a hobbyist like me, so I’m much more comfortable asking in this community where it’s highly likely that someone already crashed and burned before me, lol.
I’m thinking I’ll take the advise of just building a new server for ProxMox, and then use my current UnRaid box exclusively for storage. That should be somewhat safer, right?
That’s my current configuration, it works well. Put your storage on a separate network. I use smb shares so my data is password protected, even on that separate network.
Main downside of this is there’s more places for failure to occur. If your NAS goes down, there’s no storage access for proxmox which may cause service downtime. Alternatively if proxmox goes down, this also causes service downtime. For me this is fine, but something to keep in mind. Ideal solution would be 2 HA clusters for storage and compute, but thats expensive haha.
Run docker within lxc within proxmox. This gave me an aneurism. You’ve lost the whole point of not actually virtualizing with containers by putting in two layers deep in virtualization. At this point your shit is so convoluted why don’t you just run kubernetes
How is running a container in an LXC worse than in a VM? It’s not really, is it? No, not really. Kubernetes could also be built on top of the LXC as well, sure. There are a number of genuine benifits from running docker on top of an LXC, and it doesn’t compromise security or come with a significant performance drop (unlike VMs).
I was suggesting to do neither and run the container directly. Putting k8s on top of lxc is still completely stupid. Just run k8s bare metal to operate your containers.
Proxmox doesn’t run docker containers. You can probably install docker to make it run them, but it’s not supported.
I also wouldn’t run unraid on a virtual disk just to provide storage. Personally, I have one almalinux VM running on Proxmox that runs all my containers and has a big virtual disk to store my media.
Proxmox is Debian at its core, which is supported by Docker. There’s no good reason to not run Docker on the bare metal in a homelab. I’d be curious to know what statement Proxmox has made about supporting Docker. I’ve found nothing.
That’s not a definitive support statement about Docker being unsupported. In fact, even in the Admin Guide, it only provides recommendations. The comment I replied said Docker is unsupported by Proxmox. I maintain that there is no such statement from Proxmox.
Maybe not explicitly unsupported, but I think “it interferes with some mechanisms on which we rely” should be more discouraging than a policy statement.
I bought a used machine a couple weeks ago and am setting it up (1st bare metal build), prox with debian vm running docker. I found it annoying that pm doesn’t support it natively but the ability to do snapshots through pm is nice, and let’s me fuck around more than I would otherwise, slowly build up a machine.
But almost all of the stuff I have running on other machines is just docker containers, so it would be nice if pm just added a checkbox during install or something. (I want to poke at and learn pm, plus mess around with other vms, that’s why I didn’t do straight Debian)
LXCs let you get all the benifits of VMs with fewer drawbacks, I recommend that approach if you want some extra sandboxing than docker on bare metal provides.
To most of your comment I completely agree minus the freedom for choosing different disk sizes. You absolutely can do that with btrfs or just throwing a virtual layer on top of some disks with something like mergerfs.
You’re correct, with a bit more know how and knowledge it’s completely doable. Quick question maybe, once you create a pool and are utilizing it, are you able to add/remove drives as needed or does that require additional work to be completed? I am under the impression that the pools can be created with a variety of drives but making any physical adjustments are a bit of trouble.
However, I do appreciate you posting about this, maybe it’ll help someone else that might be browsing through here. Thank you.
It depends on your needs. It’s entirely possible to just format a bunch of disks as xfs and setup some mount points you hand to a union filesystem like mergerfs or whatever. Then you would just hand that to proxmox directly as a storage location. Management can absolutely vary depending how you do this.
At its heart it’s just Debian so it has all those abilities of Debian. The web UI is more tuned to vm/lxc management operations. I don’t really like the default lvm/ext4 but they do that to give access to snapshots.
I personally just imported an existing zfs pool into proxmox and configured it to my liking. I discovered options like directly passing datasets into lxc containers with lxc options like lxc.mount.entry
I recently finished optimizing my proxmox for performance in regards to disk io. It’s modified with things like log2ram, tmpfs in fstab for /tmp and /var/tmp, tcp congestion control set to cubic, a virtual opnsense heavily modified for 10gb performance, a bunch of zfs media datasets migrated to one media dataset and optimized for performance. Just so many tweaks and knobs to turn in proxmox that can increase performance. Folks even mention docker I’ve got it contained in an lxc. My active ram usage for all my services down to 7 gigs and disk io jumping .9 - 8%. That’s crazy but it just works.
Wouldn’t do it for a litany of reasons, but the main being that it’s not meant for such things. You want it to be as close to the OS and drivers as possible. Anything getting between Unraid managing the disks is overly complex, and asking for trouble. What happens if the container dies? What happens if the container gets OOMkill’d?
If you’re not going to use it to manage your disks, then I guess no issues, but there’s better suited software for such things.
Yeah, UnRaid does all of that, but from my very basic testing of ProxMox in an old computer, the VM management is much better than in UnRaid. The same goes for VLAN awareness with just 1 nic.
I’m in no way unsatisfied with UnRaid, but I watched a video by Christian Lempa doing something similar, only with TrueNAS instead of UnRaid, which is what got my brain thinking about all these potential options.
There’s the question of “CAN I do this?” vs “SHOULD I do this?”. I don’t think abstracting your main storage handling software away from where it definitely needs to be is going to net you anything positive, but add more issues and complications.
I’m sure you can find videos of people running drivers out of containers just because it’s possible. Should you though? Nope.
I do have the advantage of having a mirror of my server 2.5K miles away in my brother’s house. That’s probably why I’m thinking about being so candidly careless.
I appreciate the great advise. But now I’m willing to take one for the team and come back with either am horror story or an epic win.
Manage all my containers and VMs over ProxMox instead of inside UnRaid directly, effectively leaving UnRaid to be just manage storage only.
This, from my understanding, will in turn allow me to play with container options other than docker (docker is awesome, I know, but it also has limitations), effectively opening new roads of knowledge to me. UnRaid doesn’t even support Kubernetes or LXC.
Easier VLAN management in the server side. I have to play with firewall permissions on my PFSense to allow some containers to talk to others. ProxMox, being VLAN aware, would allow me to eliminate those permissions from PFSense and just manage interconnectivity via ProxMox.
While I’m aware that I can even compose dockers in UnRaid if there’s no UnRaid docker template available, it’s not the most user friendly way for managing those containers, in my opinion.
Another reason is that I’m always trying to learn new things, and from my limited experience with ProxMox (I’ve only been playing with it for about a month or so on an old rig), ProxMox is incredibly easy and powerful when it comes to container and VM deployment. The management options seem to be infinite.
Your point is very solid, which is why I’m contemplating segregating UnRaid and ProxMox into 2 separate rigs as opposed to virtualizing UnRaid.
These are hard decisions. Keep just 1 rig and spend way more time and probably migraines configuring this, or just build a new rig for ProxMox and migrate all my containers and VMs to it, which is faster, but will come at a higher monetary price, including power consumption.
Just get a separate host for whatever the VM stuff you want. You won’t need to worry about messing anything related to storage up, AND you’ll be able to mess with all the networking stuff without impacting your NAS.
If you’re just trying to run some simple services, just get a $300 Ryzen minipc. Plenty powerful for what it sounds like you’re looking to do.
Yeah. I told my wife what I wanted to do, and she actually would rather have me spend the money than risk spending too much time if and when I break something. I’m thinking a minispc Ryzen 9 or a Ryzen 7 venus, set it up with a 4TB NVMe. That should do the trick. It’s a bit over 300 bucks, but will be a bit more future proof. 64GB DDR5, and fire it away.
Have you considered the increase in disk io and that hypervisor prefer to be in control of all hardware? Including disks…
If you are set on proxmox consider that it can directly share your data itself. This could be made easy with cockpit and the zfs plugin. The plugin helps if you have existing pools. Both can be installed directly on proxmox and present a separate web UI with different options for system management.
The safe things here to use are the filesharing and pool management operations. Basically use the proxmox webui for everything it permits first.
I actually never considered this. And if I’m understanding you correctly, this would render using UnRaid unnecessary.
This is great info. I’m going to fit my current ProxMox test rig with a few disks I have (old small disks I have replaced over the years that still work) and test this option first. This might make this easier.
If this works out, I can still keep the server I set up off-site to mirror my storage, right? Even if that is still UnRaid? I need more coffee.
Yup you can. In fact you likely should and will probably find yourself improving disk io dramatically compared to your original thoughts doing this. It’s better in my opinion to let the hypervisor manage disks operations. That means in my opinion it should also share files with smb and NFS especially if you are already considering nas type operations.
Since proxmox supports zfs out of the box along with btrfs and even XFS you have a myriad of options. You combine that with cockpit and you have a nice management interface.
I went the zfs route because I’m familiar with it and I appreciate it’s native sharing options built into the filesystem. It’s cool to have the option to create a new dataset off the pool and directly pass it into a new lxc container.
I would like to ask for some suggestions on the initial process to migrate the data from UnRaid.
Considering that:
My disk pool is made out of 2 10TB disks, for a total of 20TB
It also has a 10TB parity disk
The pool is using just -6TB of the storage
The option I see is:
Get another 10TB disk
I can clear the parity drive and copy my data from the pool to that disk for migrating
Configure the pool disks to RaidZ and once I complete that, use the other 2 disks as parity pool
Or, I bite the bullet, get brand new 10TB disks, 12 to make it Raidz2 and have a storage pool of 40TB (35 usable?). I’m thinking 4 groups of 3 disks each should do the trick. Then use the same method to migrate my data.
With 64GB of ECC RAM, I should have a pretty swift storage IOPS that way.
You will be amused with zfs performance in proxmox due to all the tuning that is possible. If this is going to be an existing zfs pool keep in mind it’s easier to just install proxmox with the zfs option and let it create a zfs rpool during setup. For the rpool tweak a couple options. Make sure ashift is at least 12 during the install or 13 if you are using some crazy fast SSD as proxdisk for the rpool.
It needs to be 12 if it’s a modern day spinner and probably a good setting for most ssds. Do not go over 12 if it’s a spinning disk.
Now beyond that you can directly import your existing zfs pool into proxmox with a single import command. Assuming you have an existing zfs pool.
In this scenario zfs would be fully maintaining disk operations for both an rpool and a media pool.
You should consider tweaking a couple things to really improve performance via the guide de I linked.
Proxmox vms/zvols live in their own dataset. Before you start getting to crazy creating vms make sure you are taking advantage of all the performance tweaks you can. By default proxmox sets a default record size for all datasets to 128k. qcow2, raw, and even zvols will benefit from record size of 64k because it tends to improve the underlying filesystem performance of things like ext4, XFS, even UFS. Imo it’s silly to create vm filesystems like btrfs if you’re vm is sitting on top of a cow filesystem.
Another huge improvement is tweaking the compression algorithm. lz4 is blazing fast and should be your default go to for zfs. The new one is pretty good but can slow things down a bit for active operations like active vm disks. So make sure your default compression is lz4 for datasets with vm disks. Honestly it’s just a good default to specify for the entire pool. You can select other compressions for datasets with more static data.
If you have a media dataset full of files like music, vids, pics. Setting a record size of 1mb will heavily improve disk io operations.
In proxmox it will default to grabbing half of your memory for arc. Make sure you change that after install. It’s a file that defines arc_max in byte number format. Set the max to something more reasonable if you have 64 gigs of memory. You can also define the arc_min
Some other huge improvements? If you are using an SSD for your proxmox install I highly recommend you install log2ram on your hypervisor. It will stop all those constant log writes on your SSD. It will also sync them to disk on a timer and shutdown/reboot. It’s also a huge performance and SSD lifespan improvement to migrate /tmp and /var/tmp to tmpfs
So many knobs to turn. I hope you have fun playing with this.
Another thing to keep in mind with zfs is underlying vm disks will perform better if the zfs pool is a type of mirror or stripe of mirrors. Z1 Z2 type pools are better for media and files. Cm disk io will improve on the mirror type style dramatically. Just passing what I’ve learned over time in optimizing systems.
At the moment I am using Openmediavault as a VM within proxmox - I pass my HDDs through to this VM. Openmediavault let’s me do all the stuff I want to: Share folders via SSH, NFS and raid-management.
Do you know if I can do the same with proxmox directly? Do you maybe have a link where this way is described in detail?
At its core cockpit is like a modern day webmin that allows full system management. So yes it can help with creating raid devices and even lvms. It can help with mount points and encryption as well.
I do know it can help share whatever with smb and NFS. Just have a look at the plugins.
As for proxmox it’s just using Debian underneath. That Debian already happens to be optimized for virtualization and has native zfs support baked in.
Does this allow for easy upgrades and/or are there any issues with local storage? I used to run it about an age and a half ago, but I’ve recently wanted to spin an instance back up for a few reasons. These things change so fast, I looked away and now I’m out of the loop.
Upgrades are easy, backups are really good, if upgrades mess up, you can restore from backup even if NC is hosed. As for local storage, I never did it, but here’s the docs for it! docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/…/local.html
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