Okay I saw this posted a lot and apparently it is pretty common but why do people virtualize your nas in for example a proxmox server/cluster. If that goes down it gets super hard to get your data back than if you do it bare Metal, doesn’t it? Are people only doing it so save on seperate devices or are my concerns unreasonable?
More exciting are the people that host Their firewall/router like OPNSense/PFSense as a VM on their system! 😄
okay you actually made me laugh. that’s not easy - take an upvote.
That was me for about 2 weeks until the esxi took a shit. Never again. I basically went “fuck this shit” and bought a ubiquity udm.
I do this and it works great. My server box is always on anyway running all my services, so I might as well add another service to it. Saves on power, space and management.
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I’m all for this actually. Though I’d be doing that on a dedicated machine with just pfsense/opnsense on it. Any other way would be kinda dumb right?
I did it for years. The only problem is, if you mess up your opnsense config, you’re gonna need to get the keyboard and monitor out.
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My NAS is a VM linked to a disk array that exports some folders over NFS. It’s very simple and it’s supposed to be. I have backups of the VM configuration using etckeeper and I have backups of the data. I’ve run this setup for around 6/7 years now and haven’t had a problem with it being virtualized. It’s been very flexible as I’ve been able to migrate the VM between physical host too.
I honestly, think it’s pretty bad practice.
Hey, I got this big fancy server-
Let me install Vmware/Proxmox on it, and create some VMs.
I want a fancy dashboard to click and install my apps. and I need storage. Let me put a TrueNAS/Unraid VM on my proxmox.
Oh right, I need storage for another VM. Let me connect Vmware/Proxymox to TrueNAS/Unraid via ISCSI/NFS.
Oh this is the pinnacle of technology /s.
(Rather, then just using the hypervisor built into unraid/truenas…)
Or, my favorite, is installing a full-blown storage OS, just because you need a windows file share…
I don’t miss the TrueNAS community, and all of the stupid crap coming from it.
I agree, proxmox or truenas by itself on baremetal should cover a lot of applications. Both can do most things the other can do to some extent but each has it’s on specialties and focuses. Proxmox more for VMs, truenas for primarily storage/NAS. But both can do either.
I virtualize my NAS because it’s small (only several TB) and therefore it can be backed up like any other VM with PBS or dumped as a qcow image. A full restoration is extremely easy because I can simply have another node pull the backup from PBS. Also I can migrate the entire NAS to another node so it stays up when I have downtime.
It mostly depends on your comfort level. Generally it is frowned on. I have a proxmox cluster with two dedicated machines. One for truenas and one for unRAID.
They both get basically the entire resources from the physical servers and have dedicated hbas. I haven’t run into any performance issues, and actually prefer running it this way because if the nas vm dies for some reason I can still log into the hypervisor to fix it.
That said, I don’t think I’d ever use virtual disks in a nas and I also wouldnt run vms off of the storage in the nas vm. At least not for the same cluster. I also make sure to have backups in case anything bad does happen
On my proxmox, I make a mergefs filesystem that I just mount to my lxc containers that need shared storage.
Hard to guess at for any given situation, but a few pluses that come to mind depending on the drive arrangement would be taking out any network latency issues between a client and the nas. Or if you have a VM using the nas as its operational drive it takes out the ‘oops, lost the link and my OS drive went away’ mid run factor. Keep all your container/vm traffic internal and have that single VM sync back to a bare metal… Might have to consider some ideas on that front myself now that I think of it.
