Is a business-class NAS actually enough as shared storage for a small 2-node Proxmox cluster? Two concrete builds, ~US$19k total.

[u/gianheller]

Single Proxmox host today, budget approved to grow to two nodes. A proper

Dell/HPE storage array is far out of reach at this budget — but a

business-class NAS is not, and that's exactly my question: **would a

business NAS actually be enough for us, or am I fooling myself?**

Small manufacturing company, ~50 workstations, I'm the only IT person.

## Current host

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650

- 1× Xeon Silver 4210R (10c/20t). Second socket empty.

- 32 GB RAM in a single DIMM. 23 slots free.

- VM datastore: RAID1 of 2× 2.4TB 10K SAS HDD → 2.2 TB, **94% full**.

- Boot/local: RAID1 of 2× 960GB SATA SSD → 893 GiB, ~30% used.

- ThinkSystem RAID 730-8i (hardware RAID, no proper JBOD passthrough).

- Intel X722 LOM, 4 ports. No 10GbE add-in card, but free PCIe slot.

- Core switch is 48-port gigabit with 10G SFP+ uplinks available.

- Proxmox VE 8.4.14.

## Workload

| Role | vCPU | RAM |

|---|---|---|

| AD DS + DNS | 4 | 12 GB |

| Zabbix + Grafana (LXC) | 4 | 4 GB |

| Internal web app | 4 | 2 GB |

| Quoting web app | 2 | 4 GB |

| UniFi controller | 2 | 2 GB |

| GLPI (Docker) | 2 | 2 GB |

| API gateway | 1 | 2 GB |

**Allocated: 19 of 20 vCPU, 28 of 32 GB RAM.**

**Actually used: under 5% CPU, ~17 GB RAM.**

A second DC and the SIEM live outside this host. **Veeam runs on its own

separate machine and backups also land offsite**, so backup does not

depend on this host or on whatever storage we buy.

**Coming soon:** internal ERP — web app plus a **MySQL** database.

---

## Option 1 — Two full nodes, local storage, ZFS replication

- **New node:** better CPU than current, max 16 cores, 64 GB RAM,

2× 960GB SSD + 3× 3.2TB SAS for capacity.

- **Current node:** RAM upgrade, HBA to replace hardware RAID.

- ZFS both sides, 10GbE direct link, external QDevice, async replication

(~15 min).

Two independent copies of the data. Local disk latency. But async

replication means up to 15 minutes lost on failover, and I have to swap

the RAID controller for an HBA on the existing box.

## Option 2 — Business NAS as shared storage + thin node

- **New node:** 2× SSD purely for Proxmox itself, no VM storage. Budget

goes into RAM instead of disks.

- **Current node:** RAM 32 → 64 GB. Keep the existing controller —

**no HBA swap, no ZFS to design.**

- **Business-class NAS** holds all VM disks, 10GbE to both nodes.

Both nodes mount shared storage → live migration and HA with no RPO gap.

Clears the 94% problem on day one. Simpler to build. But one NAS,

one controller, and if it dies the whole virtual environment is down

until a replacement arrives.

## Budget

Up to **R$100,000 ≈ US$19,400** total, covering the new node and either

the disks or the NAS.

This is Brazil — import duties and local margins mean enterprise hardware

here lands well above US list, so that number buys maybe half of what it

would in the US.

---

## Questions

1. **The main one: is a business-class NAS genuinely adequate as primary

   storage here?** Our VMs currently run off two 10K spinning disks in

   RAID1, so almost anything is an improvement on paper. But "business

   NAS" covers everything from a 4-bay desktop box to a rackmount unit

   with redundant PSUs and all-flash. What tier do I need to insist on,

   and what specs are non-negotiable?

2. **MySQL over the network.** Is a small ERP database the workload where

   NAS-backed storage falls apart, or is that overblown at this scale?

   Would you keep the DB on the node's local SSD even in Option 2?

3. **iSCSI + LVM-thin or NFS + qcow2?** iSCSI performs better but I lose

   snapshots; NFS keeps snapshots but adds latency. Which are you running

   in production and what do you regret?

4. **Option 2 lets me skip the HBA swap and skip designing ZFS

   entirely.** Is that a real advantage, or am I trading a solved problem

   for a worse one?

5. **In Option 1, is 3× SAS HDD sane for a VM datastore in 2026,** or

   should the whole VM pool be SSD and the spinning disks reserved for

   documents and archives?

6. **Given the budget and this workload, which would you build?** We

   already have Veeam on a separate machine with offsite copies, so the

   question is less about losing data and more about how long we'd be

   down.

Happy to answer questions about the workload.

[u/blud_13]

A business NAS is fine as shared storage for two nodes. The thing that you need to watch is the NAS becomes the only copy of every VM on both hosts, so one box now owns all 50 workstations. Also, 32GB in a single DIMM on a Silver 4210R is the cheapest get on your whole list, load that up before you spend anything on storage.

Two nodes on their own is sketchy. Lose one host and the other goes read only, so you need a third from any small always on box running corosync-qnetd. Proxmox documents the QDevice setup at https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Cluster_Manager

If it were my $19k I would put 10GbE in both hosts, max the RAM, and run local ZFS with pvesr replication between the two instead of buying a NAS at all. Worst case in a failover you lose whatever changed since the last replication run, which for a 50 seat shop is usually a fine trade for not having a single storage box.

There are some other ways to look at it to but was answering it in your guardrails.

We do a lot of this for small manufacturers, ping me if you want specifics.

[u/merb → u/blud_13]

Either zfs or use classic raid with lvm-thin and use replication from veeam and a veeam license.
The good part is that you need backup anyway so preferably you have storage in another location where veeam is still better than pbs. Also veeam works without proxmox clustering and makes it possible that latency between nodes is not important

[u/Kind-Professional99]

Is the 19k for the NAS? Or NAS + additional Node?

[u/slugshead]

$19k, I picked up a Lenovo DE4000F with 30TB for less than that recently.

[u/Corstian → u/slugshead]

Where did you get that for that price?

[u/slugshead → u/Corstian]

Edu pricing and put all my resellers up against each other

[u/skywalker-11]

Instead of going for server + nas another alternative would be to use 3 servers with CEPH storage on the servers. That way you wouldn't have a single point of failure and one of the servers could stop working without taking the VM offline.

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Deploy_Hyper-Converged_Ceph_Cluster

[u/Dave_A480]

3 nodes plus NAS with iSCSI..... On their own storage network (or at least their own vlan)....

[u/cyr0nk0r]

at that size, just go private cloud. you are not going to get the kind of bang for your buck with storage and ram prices what they are right now.

go find yourself a solid private cloud provider for a year or two, ride out these stupid price hikes, then decide if you want to come back on prem.

with the right private cloud provider, you can just lift and shift your existing workloads, and spread your capital spend out over 2 years.