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by xoa 78 days ago
Do you have any opinions on how this works vs doing iSCSI to some other storage system using ZFS? That's how I've been handling Proxmox on the backend, and have mixed feelings. The GUI leaves a very great deal to be desired in honestly curious ways, have to touch the CLI a lot even for super basic networking or auth stuff, and of course neither side has the same insight to the data structures in question. Either you've got to do ZVOL instances and thus manual effort or scripting, or you give Proxmox a single big blob then let it manage that with LVM but that means the storage side can't give any granular help on snapshots and the like. It still can deal with data integrity and backups and storage redundancy and all that but no further, and some increased overhead. But on the other hand, I do feel like a really firm separation of concerns isn't without value. Having native support though is an interesting alternative I hadn't really considered.
1 comments

Too late to edit, but just as a note for anyone else who gets confused by my post: I was not paying careful enough attention and missed/misread the "backups" bit in the parent post, completely my fault. As far as I can tell from reading through the (quite pleasant!) documentation [0], Sylve does not (at least for now) support any sort of network storage for direct use as the VM backing store, though as it is FreeBSD underneath it's presumably doable to get something going from the command line. I'd thought they'd somehow managed to set something up so you could directly use another ZFS system via SSH as the primary backing store with management which would be pretty awesome. It still looks like a beautiful design, but since I'm pretty invested right now in separating out storage into its own hardware vs where compute happens it'd be hard to setup nodes as AIO for the near future at least here.

Still an awesome project to learn about and I hope it's successful.

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0: https://sylve.io/docs/

It's funny, I love how FreeBSD manages iSCSI even though I have only used it a few times, I put it in my to-do list but never really got around to writing a UI for it. Come next release (v0.3.0) I will definitely integrate it because as your put it's quite necessary to have that as a way to isolate storage from the main system.
Not sure you'll see this so late but just wanted to say I really appreciate the reply and learning about this project. I've been working to switch myself and various places away from perpetual ESXi licenses as it finally starts really getting old, and while I'm thankful Proxmox exists I've always loved FreeBSD (was kinda bummed when TrueNAS moved from it) and Proxmox can be irksome. Even at such an early stage Sylve already looks like it's clicking nicely. Excited to see next release and what comes in the future.