I have used Proxmox for a long time and have always faced storage problems. The hypervisor itself is fantastic. Using NAS directly, however, is not ideal. You cannot just spin up an SMB share or deal with mixed-size disks without immediately dropping to the command line and fighting with config files.
Everybody suggests fixing this problem by creating a TrueNAS VM. Then you need to pass through an entire physical PCIe HBA, lock away 8GB of RAM just for ARC, and hope for the best. I have built that same exact setup. It works fine until you hit the dependency loop nightmare. If that TrueNAS VM crashes or gets hung up during a reboot, every single container on your network that relies on those network shares crashes right along with it.
This weekend I tore that setup down to test a much better alternative called ANAS. It’s a third-party add-on that patches TrueNAS-style storage management directly into the native Proxmox web interface. You don't have VM overhead anymore. You don't need HBA passthrough. Most importantly, it supports Synology-style Hybrid RAID so you can actually mix and match weird disk sizes.
Here are the exact steps I used to build a test pool and get a share running on my own lab node.
Pre-flight checks
ANAS needs ZFS 2.2 or higher. Check your host before you start.
pveversion && zfs version
Expected Output:
If you are running Proxmox 8.x or 9.x, you are well above the requirement.
Before you install, make sure you have unallocated drives available. We tested this with a nested Proxmox VM, attaching three raw virtual disks (sdb, sdc, sdd). You can check your available drives with:
lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,TYPE,MOUNTPOINT,FSTYPE
The Install
Proxmox does not ship with the packages ANAS relies on (Samba, mdadm, Node.js). The installer handles grabbing them, but you have to use a pre-compiled release, not a raw git clone.
Drop into your Proxmox host shell:
# Grab the 0.3.4 release tarball cd ~ curl -L -o anas-0.3.4.tar.gz https://github.com/ccebelenski/anas/releases/download/v0.3.4/anas-0.3.4.tar.gz # Extract it tar -xzf anas-0.3.4.tar.gz cd anas-0.3.4 # Run the installer with dependency fetching enabled ./install.sh --install-deps
This takes a few minutes. It installs the missing packages, sets up the loopback API, and injects the UI code into pveproxy.
When it finishes, do a hard refresh on your Proxmox web UI. Click your node in the datacenter view, and you will see the new ANAS menu block at the bottom of the sidebar.
Building a Hybrid RAID Pool
I threw mismatched disk sizes at it to see if the Hybrid RAID actually works like Synology's SHR. It does.
Click on ANAS > Hybrid RAID. Hit Create. Your raw disks will show up in the left column. Name the pool (nas1). Drag the disks into the pool bay. The UI gives you a live layout preview. Because I used a 20GB and two 30GB drives, it showed exactly how it was slicing them to build protected bands and avoiding wasted space. Hit Create pool.
It formats the disks and mounts the pool automatically (e.g., at /mnt/anas-ahr/nas1).
Creating the SMB Share
With the pool mounted, getting it on the network takes around ten seconds.
Go to ANAS > Shares. Click SMB Share. Name it (I used nas1data), and set the path to your pool mount (/mnt/anas-ahr/nas1). For a quick lab test, I checked Allow access without authentication so I did not have to mess with user ACLs right away. Click on Create.
To test it, I jumped over to my Ubuntu daily driver, opened Files > Network, and connected to smb://<PROXMOX-IP>/nas1data. It mounted instantly.
That is basically it. The project is still in its early days, but having bare-metal storage management baked directly into port 8006 without having to fight with IOMMU groups is a massive quality-of-life upgrade for any homelab. If you've got a test node lying around, it's definitely worth wiping a few spare disks to try it out yourself.
