[RossBencina]

I've been thinking about setting up something like this for a while. I have a Broadwell dual socket Xeon workstation that I'm going to upgrade to Proxmox. Would it be reasonable to run something like this as an LXC or VM or would you put it in the base kernel?

[TacticalCoder]

> I have a Broadwell dual socket Xeon workstation that I'm going to upgrade to Proxmox. Would it be reasonable to run something like this as an LXC or VM or would you put it in the base kernel?

I've got a small HP Z440 workstation (small in that it's 10 years old and only single-CPU) and a 14 cores / 28 threads Xeon e5-2680 v4 in it. It's a little workhorse.

I run Proxmox (basically "Debian + ZFS out of the box + easy to spawn VMs / LXCs") on it.

And you can totally put something like FreeNAS in a VM. If you plan to really serve lots of files and need lots of perfs, you should get a tiny bit fancy and passthrough to the FreeNAS VM an entire disk controller (device passthrough to a VM in this day and age of LLMs that are there to find the relevant parts of docs for you in a split second is easy). IIRC the FreeNAS documentation itself explains how to run FreeNAS in a VM so I don't think it's "unsupported".

There's nothing wrong with running it bare either.