Selfhosted

If you want multiple VMs to use the storage on the ZFS pool, better to create it in proxmox rather than passing raw disks thru to the VM.

ZFS is awesome, I wouldn't use anything else now.

I did on proxmox. One thing I didn't know about ZFS, it has a lot of random writes, I believe logs and journaling. I killed 6 SSDs in 6 months. It's a great system - but consumer SSDs can't handle it.

better to pass the individual disks through to the VM and manage the zpool from there?

That's what I do.

I like it better this way, because less dependencies.

Proxmox boots from it's own SSD, the VM that provides the NAS lives there, too.

The zpool (consisting of 5 good old harddisks) can be easily plugged somewhere else if needed, and it carries the data of the NAS, but nothing else. I can rebuild the proxmox base, I can reinstall that VM, they all do not affect each other.

I run proxmox and a trunas VM.

• TrueNAS is on a virt disk on a NVME drive with all the other VMs/LXCs
• I pass the HBA through to TrueNAS with PCI passthrough: 6 disk Raid z2. this is 'vault' and has all my backups of hone dirs and photos etc
• I pass through two HDs as raw disks for bulk storage (of linux ISOs): 2 disk Mirrored zfs

Seems to work well

I am more looking into BTRF for backup due to I run Linux and not BSD ZFS requires more RAM I only have one disk I want to benefit from snapshots, compression and deduplication.

Yes we run ZFS. I wouldn't use anything else. It's truly incredible. The only comparable choice is LVMRAID + Btrfs and it still isn't really comparable in ease of use.

I use zfs with Proxmox. I have it as a bind mount to Turnkey Fileserver (a default lxc template).

I access everything through NFS (via turnkey Fileserver). Even other VMs just get the NFS added to the fstab file. File transfers happen extremely fast VM to VM, even though it's "network" storage.

This gives me the benefits of zfs, and NFS handles the "what if's", like what if two VMs access the same file at the same time. I don't know exactly what NFS does in that case, but I haven't run into any problems in the past 5+ years.

Another thing that comes to mind is you should make turnkey Fileserver a privileged container, so that file ownership is done through the default user (1000 if I remember correctly). Unprivileged uses wonky UIDs which requires some magic config which you can find in the docs. It works either way, but I chose the privileged route. Others will have different opinions.

Most NAS VMs want you to pass them the raw device so they can manage ZFS themselves. For every other VM, I have the VM running on ZFS storage that Proxmox uses and manages, and it will manage the datasets for backup, snapshots, etc.

It is definitely the way to go. The ability to snapshot a VM or CT before updates alone is worth it.

I use ZFS but you need to be very aware of its problems

Learn zpool

both works. Just do not forgot to assign fake serial numbers if you are passing disks. IMHO passing disk will be more performant, or may be just pass HBA controller if other disks are on different controller.

ZFS is great, but to take advantage of it's positives you need the right drives, consumer drives get eaten alive as @scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech mentioned and your IO delay will be unbearable. I use Intel enterprise SSDs and have no issues.