Single Server HomeLab Using Proxmox (Proxmox Hypervisor and NAS)

In this video I cover how to turn Proxmox into a NAS of sorts with samba/SMB and NFS. This tutoral walking thought the installation and setup of Proxmox. I use an LXC container and Cockpit to share out storage on the Proxmox underlying ZFS backed storage. In Cockpit I use a few tools from 45 drives to manage users, navigate our storage and created/manage our SMB and NFS shares.
Proxmox:
www.proxmox.com/en/
Intro to cockpit:
www.redhat.com/sysadmin/intro...
Links to Cockpit plugins/modules used:
github.com/45Drives/cockpit-f...
github.com/45Drives/cockpit-n...
github.com/45Drives/cockpit-i...

[@kingneutron1]

Very concisely edited - nice presentation :)

[@perkelatorZ79]

Thank you! I really feel like my editing skills need to get quite a bit better, but it is nice to know I am heading in the correct direction.

[@purplepurrpurrin]

Fantastic video. I have not used cockpit often but it was great to learn about those plugins.

[@perkelatorZ79]

I am thinking about exploring this topic in greater depth. A similar setup to this, but with Ubuntu or Debian as the base OS and using cockpit and virt-manager to create a hypervisor/NAS. The issue with this Proxmox setup is that the container does need to be micro managed a bit when it comes to RAM and mount points. Thanks for the comment! means a lot.

[@purplepurrpurrin]

That sounds like a fun video idea, I have been using qemu-kvm a lot recently on my nested lab machines and making use of libvirt as well as a bit of vagrant.@@perkelatorZ79

[@ben94_]

great video thanks

[@perkelatorZ79]

Glad you enjoyed it! thanks for watching.

[@Bubreg1988]

I am currently building a Homelab and I cannot decide between Proxmox + (LXC) NAS (Cockpit, turnkey fileserver, ...) or Proxmox + VM TrueNAS. A lot of people went with the second option, but to me it seems the second option requires a lot of resources for the same job. What features does TrueNAS have that Proxmox + Cockpit do not have? Most of the discussion in this directions ends with either that it is stupid to put TrueNAS in VM or that Cockipit does not have all of the NAS features from TrueNAS, but it seems hard to find what does Features are and why it is stupid to put it in a VM in the first place? Thank you for the video it is great.

[@perkelatorZ79]

The reason why people think it is "stupid" to put TrueNAS in a VM is that typically people do not passtough the entire drive to TrueNAS and ZFS really wants hardware level access to the drives. The drives them self lie enough no need for an OS in the way too. You can passthough an entire sata controller is my preferred method. There are many issues with putting any NAS in VM. That doesn't mean it is bad for homelab. For production it introduces complexity that is unnecessary, but for homelab where the risk is lower I see no problem with it. Honestly if it is purely for homelab I would set up each and test them out for a month or 2 and see what feels best and document your experience with each. I have used each of these setups for a few months and found the one I like. It doesn't mean it is the solution for everyone. Personally I do like split the systems just for simplicity and if I decide to say drop Proxmox and use say Ubuntu for my host, when i come crawling back my NAS data is safe and I got to learn something by playing with Ubuntu for my host. If I had one box I would do something similar to this as I do not need the features of truenas and I am only 1-5 users so it isn't hard to manage without truenas's nice UI.

[@Bubreg1988]

Thank you for a very nice answer. It helped me decide to go with this approach ❤ I can see some advantages of virtual NAS but for me personally my Homelab is not yet there with complexity. Anyway I think a good trick is also to have Ansible scripts for most of this stuff then setting up the environment can be much easier in the future, so I will try to script some parts of your tutorial. Thanks for the help and I am looking forward to seeing some new videos.

[@fool9111z]

@@Bubreg1988 start with something really simple than erecting a huge learning curve on every service. I’d start with a simple ubuntu vm with samba and usb drive pass through. Right away, you have a SMB for media file sharing, and proxmox vm/lxc backup. When you got time, do more research to find out whether it’s worth while to spend more time on truenas, freenas, open media vault or dsm 7. Or perhaps you want to look into pbs first to make more efficient vm/lxc backup. If you start with too grand a plan, every step is full of new and unknown, you are more likely to be frustrated.

[@LAMBDA34]

Any disadvantages to using ZFS (RAID 0) vs ext4 on a single drive? I would like to install Proxmox as ZFS (RAID0) rather than ext4 on a single 500GB Firecuda 530 NVMe but read that if a power outage happens Proxmox can corrupt. I currently have pfSense Plus installed as ZFS, TrueNAS Scale, and UniFi Self-hosted Console.

[@antoniodagata1265]

Very useful video! I'm going to install proxmox soon, do you recommend to use cockpit to create the optimal storage for others lxc like arr-programs and vm? I have a laptop with 500gb nvme and an external 500gb hdd (it's not a lot but I will use it for media only)

[@perkelatorZ79]

I would only store the containers data that matter (in this case media) on the NFS/samba shares. It would make the docker setup a bit more difficult. I also wouldn't store VM data on the shares it just adds overhead that is not needed. Since the data will be stored on the same disk regardless. I would look more into examples of people with aar setups personally I haven't used them long term only for small test, hence why I haven't made a video on setup of arr programs yet. It will be coming , but maybe about 6 or so months out while I like you learn the best way to set them up on one pc with minimal storage.

[@poolace]

I install proxmox (graphical) without a mouse all the time. {TAB} is your friend.

[@perkelatorZ79]

Yeah I have thought about that since making this video I should have thought about it, but I did not thanks for the comment it could help someone!

[@Thomas88-_-]

this is a great video only problem i have is all my drives are on a pcie sata expander card, so they dont show up in proxmox zfs... i dont now how to fix this i can make a truenasVm and pass it thru no issues but no go in proxmox natively

[@danchieev]

I had an issue with HDD pass-through in Truenas. My drives are on a HBA card and was trying to a pass-through to truenas-"this cause of action is a pain to deal with. Sometimes my samba share would disappear and drives appear if they haven't been passed through to truenas'. I ended up passing through the drives to a Windows VM which allows one to create a parity raid and you can swap/restore a failed drive. Also tried to setup a Fedora VM with cockpit as the GUI but the drives take a day or less to format and be ready.

[@perkelatorZ79]

Could be something odd with Proxmox and compatibility with that particular pcie sata card, but I have never seen that before.

[@alfonce7613]

great video! except im getting errors when trying to mount the NFS "cant find in /etc/fstab" any pointers? EDIT: Not sure if anyone else ended up with this problem but i fixed it by adding the config in the /etc/fstab file. Worked perfectly after that

[@perkelatorZ79]

I am glad you found a fix for it sorry for not replying in a timely manner

[@deathsycthehe11]

Great video! I am new to this, how do I create user own personal folder where only the user and admin has access? I know the user has home directory, but thats limited to the 8GB config of the root folder. Would I need to create datasets for each user and mount it?

[@perkelatorZ79]

That is a great question. I would just create different datasets for each user as you suggested. It is simple and it prevents you from having the mess with permissions to much.

[@INTERNET_RYAN]

GREAT video. I am at a loss however with a situation I've run into. I created a mount that's about 20TB big. I have a directory I am attempting to copy via samba that's about 2TB but I keep getting an error saying there isn't enough disk space. I verified that there is the full 20TB free but it says that i need an additional 409GB to finish the transfer. below that it says the free space is only 886GB and total size is 1.8TB have i misconfigured something? i'm at a loss of where to ask this but i'll run a hail mary to you :p

[@INTERNET_RYAN]

UPDATE: I think for some reason it was trying to put it all into the NVME cache i have so i used zfs set sync=disabled YOURPOOL/DATASET and it worked. I'll turn it back on when i'm done with the large transfers. Again thank you for the video.

[@perkelatorZ79]

Thank god you solved this on your own I would have had no idea why that would have happened.

[@doriancrockrell8700]

Not working for me loads of errors with the install. did the privileged container and i am getting nfs.server errors and the dependent services are not running debian 12 standard used just like the video. Not sure what the issue really is.

[@perkelatorZ79]

I would start by looking into the errors during install. I personally haven't experienced many errors during installs of proxmox. You also need to set the apparmor parameter set in the video, that is in the containers conf file. I have tested this on a few machines, but that is no guarantee it will work on everything.

[@basdfgwe]

I thought a laptop would be good for Homelab proxmox, main reason is that they come with equiped battery and on failure I can safely execute a script to shutdown. In reality laptops are very limited and get really quickly - I didn't account for temperature management. I think if you an indication of running a bit of virtualisation then don't go with laptops. I still have 1 laptop for proxmox, but everything else is sitting across two servers. Backup certain files to synology.

[@perkelatorZ79]

I would agree I really on recommend using a laptop in the case that you already on it. It cuts down on e-waste (atleast for a time) and I find it rewarding to repurpose old hardware.

[@TheInternalNet]

Amazing tutorial. Here is the problem I keep having every single time I nice data between machines I lose a good chunk of it. Either empty folders or 0 file sizes. Using SCP or FTP.

[@perkelatorZ79]

Thanks! Just to be clear do you mean you are having issues with this setup in syncing data top the container or is this a general issue. I have not used SCP or FTP to move files to the container. I will try it tho to see if i can replicate your issue.

[@TheInternalNet]

@@perkelatorZ79 So every time I try to copy data between machine, Regardless of protocols. Some end up not copying correctly. I cannot figure out whats causing the files not to copy. I end up with either empty folders or files with 0 file size.

[@perkelatorZ79]

What OS and could they be softlinks that are trying to be moved if this is linux? I am kind of at a lose on this as I am not sure the setup and there could be quite a few things going wrong. To be clear is this related to the video? I dont mind helping if not just want to make sure I am on the right track.+

[@TheInternalNet]

@@perkelatorZ79 So currently trying to go from TrueNAS Scale to TrueNAS Scale. Previous windows to linux and vice versa. Every single time I something hapens. Shouldnt be any links. All just straight SMB shares. I would think it should copy effortlessly. No it is not. Just movign my data to a VM and want to ensure I do not loose any more data.

[@brianhansen9578]

@@TheInternalNet Use the built-in truenas zfs replication ? Very easy to setup between two truenas scale systems

[@BrandonTan]

Would it be possible to show how you would install Proxmox in Ubuntu instead of Arch Linux?? Thanks

[@perkelatorZ79]

I could do this in the future. I believe you are talking about creating the ventoy install correct? Like the boot disk?