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

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.