ZFS for pfSense VM on Proxmox with ZFS?

So, greetings…I’m new to the forums. I’ve been watching the L1 YouTube channel for a few years and really enjoy it, figured it’s time to come by here and talk to some real pros! :slight_smile:

Anyway, I recently had to build a new virtual server to host my pfSense firewall. I was previously using a Supermicro based microATX board (A1SAi-2750F) with an Atom proc and 32GB of ECC memory but that mobo died on me after 4 years of service. I didn’t think Supermicro would fix the board that I bought in 2017, so I decided to buy new hardware and reinstall. I’ve since contacted them and they are giving me an RMA…so maybe they will? At any rate, I already bought new hardware and am going to roll with the new stuff…I’ll figure out what do do with the Supermicro setup when I get it back.

My new mobo is not a server class board, it’s a Gigabyte B365M DS3H. I couldn’t really afford to go with a new server board this time and figured this would be good enough. (time will tell if I’m wrong, or maybe someone will chime in). I combined it with an Intel i5 9400, 32GB of Crucial DDR4 2666, 1 WD SN550 NVMe for the OS, 2 WD Blue 3D NAND SATA SSD’s for the VM’s, a quad Intel gigabit NIC, and a 500 watt bequiet! PurePower power supply. Not the highest end hardware, but all new and should last a long time. I know people run pfSense on lesser hardware, but of course I’m adding in the Proxmox factor too.

My old system was running ESXi bare metal install and I had pfSense, 2 Windows 2016 Domain Controllers, and a couple of experimental VM’s that I’d fire up occasionally on it. The old system ran “ok”, but it may have been under-powered at times (especially the Windows boxes).

My new system will be primarily used for my pfSense router/firewall. I do plan to run Suricada on the box as well and I’d like to probably throw in something to do dockers for a few apps here local on my network (bitwarden and something to do log collection/alerting). I tried to install ESXi bare metal on the new system, but it gave me issues trying to detect my NICs and I just decided to scrap ESXi and go Proxmox.

I’m new to Proxmox and new to ZFS. When I installed Proxmox I installed it on ZFS and mirrored the 2 SATA SSDs. All went well. I created my first VM which was the pfSense box. Well, the installer prompted me for UFS or ZFS. After duckducking around (no more Google in this house!) I saw quite a few posts saying ZFS was the way to go. So, I created 2 virtual drive in Proxmox for the VM and I went ahead and installed pfSense in ZFS mode. Now I’m wondering if I made a mistake or if it matters. I basically have ZFS on top of ZFS. Is that ok? What’s the downside? Should I start over and go back to UFS on the pfSense? it’s not too late now since the box isn’t into production yet.

Anway, sorry for the long post, figured the background was useful and may solicit some other recommendations. Appreciate any feedback.

Thanks!
Randy

You should probably do UFS for your pfsense vm because ZFS expects to have full disk access.

Honestly not sure how ZFS on ZFS would do but they’d probably step on each other’s toes constantly.

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@Dynamic_Gravity thanks for the reply. I had a feeling that I had made a mistake. I got hooked into thinking that ZFS was the way to go, but didn’t think about how it would do stacked like this. I guess I should blow this VM away and start it over. No biggie.

Thanks again,
Randy

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You’re welcome!

I hope it all goes well.

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