OMV, My next NAS?

Hi Everybody,

First of all, hope I am posting in the correct section of the forum, but since it is kind of general I posted it here.

After having run OMV for several yeas as a backup NAS on my HPE Microserver Gen8 I am getting more fond of it each year.

I have had QNAP (forgot about the model but a Atom based one) Devices and Synology (DS1512+) and now running on a Xpenology HPE Microserver Gen8 with a Xeon E-1230V2 and 16GB mem. My lab Environment is running on A Supermicro 5028D-TNT4T with 128Gb ram and 4 wd red 10TB drive. This enveronment runs ESXi 6.7 with A freenas VM as storage with Storage controller passthrough and the drives directly attached to the VM. Freenas provides a NFS share for ESXi and there are 2 SSD for the ZFS logs and on NVME drive for the VM's installation. All data is shared between the VM's and ESXI host trough NFS and the actual storage is on the ZFS volume in Freenas.
So far so good, this last approach is almost perfect. But the Supermicro is much more power hungry and noisier then the HPE microservers. So for my Always on solution A am looking for a new approach and have almost decided that OMV should be the way to go.

All servers are using EEC memory.

I did a lot of research and read a lot of posts and hoot's. Did my fair share of POC's etc.

This is what it boils down to.

FreeNas/Truenas is quite good, but since Docker is very important to me and Docker implementation on FreeBSD is no way as good as on Linux that is a big hit.

Also, while I love ZFS I find it too memory hungry and do not need all the redundancy etc. I backup all My data to 2 external 14TB WD elements and each Sunday I bring up my lab environment to synch them with resilio sync etc. All the important files (documents and photos) are synced to my one drive business account (5TB) and encrypted.

So I want to use all available space on my drives but in one large volume. I have experimented with Union FS and must say that I like it, it has a couple of quirks (docker does not like it sometimes) but it get the job doen and I am fond of the fact that I can access the data directly on the drive itself also. If one drive fails I can still access the data on the other drive without time consuming raid rebuilds etc.

All this stuff is available in OMV and works quite good.

One other Option is ProxMox. But ProxMox is not a NAS and to use it als one is not Ideal in my opinion.

Virtualising OMV in ProxMox kind of sounds like going about it in the wrong way, so there you go OMV it is.

But now my challenges.

My biggest one is that I want to be able to use KMV and Cockpit Virtual Machine manager is not very good.

I know I can install Virtual Box on OMV 5.5 but don't want to pollute OMV with stuff the developers have removed, I want to keep OMV queen and install most stuff through Docker.

I have installed rdesktop container in Docker and tried to connect to KVM on OMV though ssh but could not get it to work. So I am looking for a good solution.

Other one the is file system, like I said I do not need the redundancy of a fancy FS but like the options that BTRFS provides like snapshotting and data compression and deduplication.

I have setup each volume as a one drive BTRFS but am not sure if this is wise and am open for suggestions, please elaborate on why I should do it or not as I want to learn form it also.

One other big thing I miss in OMV is a good web explorer, I know I can use Nextcloud, Filecloud, Cloudcommander, filebrowser, krusader etc. but none of them give me all the options I need. The way the Synology file explorer works is really good, like right click the folder and see what the seize of it is, drag and drop files between the PC and the NAS trough the browser etc. So if anyone has a good option I am all ears. I saw a promising project called OMV WEBDESK that looks very promising but it looks abandoned.

OMV WEBDESK

So this is quite the story so I hope you did not get bored half the way and not all my questions are in here but I thought let me start a thread and see where it goes, also as a test on how good the community is in helping each other as that is one big aspect also if you choose for a OpenSource free solution.

Almost forgot,

The server I have bought for the new NAS is a HPE microserver Gen 10plus with a Xeon E-2236 64GB ECC memory 4 6Tb WD red and one 500 GB SSD.

OK that's it for now, hope to see a lot of comments and tips and if I am making stupid mistakes don't spare me but keep ik polite.

Zitat von ryecoaaron

I'm hoping this solves the proxmox/virtualbox "problem" - New openmediavault-kvm plugin. Please try it out. My ultimate goal is to replace my own proxmox install with this plugin. I will still use the proxmox kernel because it is more stable than Debian Backports.

Hi, I have installed it, is looking good, but when I try to edit a machine I can only edit CPU and memory, am I doing something wrong?

Zitat von ryecoaaron

What else do you want to edit? You can add/remove disks and isos. You can also edit the VM's xml in the Advanced dropdown.

Change the network interface for example, ini that possible?

Anybody advice of how to set-up my filesystem taking the things I mentioned into account?
Does a single drive BTRFS file sys make any sense?

Zitat von ryecoaaron

That is one thing I didn't think would be very common.

Surprise!
But I am already very happy with your work! So thank you very much for you effort!