I’m considering converting my Rockstor NAS into a Proxmox virtual server, inside which I hope to run Rockstor, and possibly Ubuntu / other distros.
The reasoning for this, is that I currently have 2 machines running 24/7/365 and both machines do absolutely nothing most of the time.
As I’m not very experienced in setting up VM’s I was hoping for an easy way to acomplish this. And from what I have seen Proxmox is relatively easy to set up.
The Proxmox machine would run Rockstor in a VM, with full disk passthrough of the disks in my btrfs pool. And it would also be running a Ubuntu setup, mostly to simply run Logitech media server (with Triodes Spotify plugin (I know theres a Squeezebox Rock-on for Rockstor, but it cant do everything I want it to)). Possibly some other distros if I want to try something out.
I know this is not a Proxmox support forum, so I’m just hoping for some pointers to if this would work (and be stable) or not.
I am currently testing a Ubuntu setup in a Oracle virtualbox (on Win10), and allthough Ubuntu / Linux can make an experienced Windows user feel completely helpless at times, it only took me 2 or 3 hours to get a setup running, that will do the things I need it to.
So not that frightening after all, but a lot of Googling…
Is it easy to setup Rockstor in Proxmox, and maintain as much of the current setup as possible? Could I setup Proxmox on another drive (I have an SSD ready for the task), and then boot the current Rockstor install in a VM, or would it need to be a new install?
I’m thinking of letting Rockstor have access to all cores and 6GB mem, and then let Ubuntu run on 2 cores 2GB mem.
The computer is an older Phenom 940 3Ghz with 8GB ram, on which Rockstor runs rock solid.
Hi @KarstenV,
currently both my running Rockstor (50+ users in office) and development environment I use to code over Rockstor are running on Proxmox, plus one Debian VM Active Directory Domain Controller with Samba 4, one lxc with Tomcat with Eset Remote Administrator Server and one old win2000 server (some old apps), all running over 8GB Ram and a 1.9 GHz Xeon Hexa core
Backup your config, install a new Rockstor, restore your config and import your disks.
My suggestion: take some time to test disks passthrough (there’s a good howto over Proxmox docu)
Could I setup Proxmox on another drive (I have an SSD ready for the task)…
It looks like something I should allready have done a long time ago
I will look into it.
I will install Proxmox completely separate, maintain my current setup untouched, and experiment with Rockstor and disk passthrough on Proxmox, with some of the other empty disks I have. When I’m confident enough, I will try getting the current setup up and running in a VM.
Im awating a cabinet for my server, and when its mounted there, it vill be relatively easy for me to add remove drives, and experiment with setting this up.
My current Rockstor pool is not going anyway near this before I’m abolutely certain I know what I’m doing
I have gotten as far as to have a Proxmox up and running, 2 VM’s installed, one Ubuntu one Rockstor.
I was at first experimenting on an old laptop, but it was slow, and didn’t support KVM so that was a slow experience. But I did learn enough that I went ahead on the machine I plan to run this later.
Installed on al older 80Gb Intel SSD, bootup is very fast and the VM’s boot fast too.
It runs very smooth, fast and reliably.
But I cannot figure out how to pass physical disks to a VM. I could GPT them and then they would probably be available, but I don’t want to do that to my Current Rockstor Pool.
Have you got any pointers. I have searched the Proxmox forums, but they were of little help to me.
I thought this would be relatively straight forward, but I cant figure it out
Thanks. I didn´t find that page during my searches.
I was hoping it would be a litlle easier than this.
I’m not afraid of the commands, but rather that in 6 months or a year or whatever, when a disk fails, or I have to reinstall. I would have to go out and search for this again
I was really hoping for a way to “forward” the disks to the Rockstor VM through the GUI.
Question: When they write e.g. “update VM 592”, I would have to replace 592, with the number of my Rockstor VM (100)?
The people/nerds writing these howto’s sometimes skip these important details, and take for granted that the users know more than they actually do
Thanks for your answers, I’ll work on it later. Right now my non-virtual Rockstor install is booted and I’m gonna watch a movie from the pool
Sooo just to be clear (pardon my ignorance) does this mean Rockstar can be installed in an LXC on Proxmox??? I’m about to undertake this installation on new hardware and am very interested in this specific arrangement. Thanks.
Thanks for the VERY quick response! I am (as I type this) installing Proxmox on Fusion on my MBP. I’ll be installing Rockstar on top of that tonight so I can play with settings/features the next few days before installing on the new hardware this weekend. I’ll report back on the ease/difficulty once complete.
Glad I had to delay my weekend plans, I’ll be sure to keep an eye on this over at Proxmox for a resolution before installing everything. Thanks for posting @Tomasz_Kusmierz
Just to add another point of view I can say that my testing over the last 5 days or so with RockStor running as a VM within ESXi 6.5 (free license) has been great. I leveraged Raw Disk Mapping (I don’t have a PCIe HBA/RAID card to passthrough so this was my next best option) to pass the disks to RockStor. There were some quirks initially where I couldn’t get RockStor to wipe the drives but after looking into it a bit more it was because there was a GPT partition table setup already which had become corrupted for some reason. Also I had to leverage the ESXi setting of disk.enableUUID=TRUE to get RockStor to recognize the disks.
After that, I setup RAID0 on 2x2TB drives and its worked well so far. I have a Win10 VM running on the same ESXi host and after exporting a 250GB NFS share and adding a new VMDK to the Win10 VM, I was up and running with really great speeds (a copy of a 8GB game folder to the drive in Win10 showed ~280MB/s transfer speed).
I really like it so far as it resolved my speed issues when leveraging the disk directly within ESXi (ESXi pretty much REQUIRES a separate RAID/HBA card to get good read/write speeds on a spinning disk drive I’ve learned). That and it gives me a nifty dashboard and cool data resiliency features for my media and expanding VM environment.
