ANAS — A NAS

The storage layer Proxmox VE doesn't have, inside the Proxmox web UI.

Proxmox VE manages VMs and containers and the storage they consume. It doesn't do much for the storage you serve to everything else: file shares, block targets, and the pools and disks behind them. ANAS fills that gap, on the PVE node itself: ZFS pools, Hybrid RAID pools that mix drive sizes and grow one disk at a time, datasets and zvols, SMB and NFS shares, an iSCSI target, snapshots and scrubs on a schedule, replication with zfs send/recv, file and block backup to Proxmox Backup Server (and restore), client-side NFS/CIFS mounts, and disk health.

The UI is a set of native ExtJS panels added to the Proxmox web UI, the same way Proxmox does Ceph. You don't deploy an appliance or pass an HBA through to a NAS VM, and there's no second web app or second login. You're already logged into PVE, and since PVE tickets are valid cluster-wide, the same browser tab works on every node.

Status: pre-1.0. Actively developed and dogfooded on a production PVE cluster, but interfaces and behavior may change without notice. Use at your own risk — and read the guest philosophy below for why the risk is smaller than you'd think.

Screenshots

Live dashboard — pool health, capacity, and real-time per-pool and per-disk I/O + latency, for ZFS and AHR pools alike. Caught here with an AHR array expanding online, one disk at a time.

Hybrid RAID (AHR) — build a redundant pool from mixed-size disks by dragging them in, with a live sliced layout and honest capacity accounting. The advisor won't let you footgun it — here it flags that a single disk has no redundancy, and exactly what's needed to fix it, rather than silently building something unsafe.

SMB & NFS shares — create and secure shares with per-share access control: valid users, browseable, read-only, and allowed/denied hosts.

Scheduled snapshots & scrubs — uniform snapshot schedules across ZFS and AHR, driven by systemd timers with keep-N-per-period retention and sane presets built in.

Features

Pools

• ZFS pools — create/import/export/destroy, scrub, topology view with per-bay disk health, device errors and properties. A drag-to-build vdev composer shows capacity and redundancy as you go, and a rules-based advisor warns about layouts with no redundancy or wasted space before you build them. Special/dedup vdevs and RAIDZ expansion are supported; PVE-owned pools are tagged and left alone.
• Hybrid RAID (AHR) — Synology-SHR-style pools from mismatched disk sizes, using every drive's full height (a 12 TB next to 8 TBs contributes all 12, not 8): disks are sliced into size-matched bands, each band is its own md RAID5/6 array, LVM concatenates the bands, and one btrfs filesystem sits on top (checksums + scrub; redundancy always lives in md, never btrfs-RAID). Grow as you buy — add or live-replace one disk at a time while the pool stays mounted, with a layout preview that names what each combination yields and what stays locked until a matching disk arrives. Expansion is a resumable multi-layer job; power loss mid-reshape is survivable. Hot spares are full-coverage — sliced into every band so md owns failover.

Data

• Datasets — tree view, quotas, compression/dedup/sync/trim, and a POSIX-ACL permissions editor with a layered access view.
• ZFS volumes (zvols) — listed with size, volblocksize and usage; create, grow while in use (the initiator rescans and sees the new size), snapshot and destroy. PVE guest volumes stay read-only.
• Snapshots — create, rename, rollback (gated), clone, destroy on ZFS; the same verbs on AHR over btrfs @data/@snapshots subvolumes, where rollback preserves the replaced state rather than destroying it.
• Schedules — uniform snapshot and scrub schedules across ZFS and AHR, on systemd timers, with keep-N-per-period retention that never prunes a held snapshot. Scrubs start and stop from the UI and report progress and a last-scrub verdict.
• Replication — zfs send/recv tasks on systemd timers: local pool→pool and remote over SSH. PVE cluster peers are auto-discovered; external hosts — including TrueNAS — need only sshd and ZFS, nothing installed. Host keys are pinned and shown; when a remote is rebuilt you re-trust it from the UI.

Serving

• SMB shares — full share lifecycle over a round-trip smb.conf editor that preserves your comments and formatting; per-share access control (valid users, browseable, read-only, allowed/denied hosts) and a connection-details view.
• NFS exports — the same treatment for /etc/exports.
• iSCSI target — manages LIO (targetcli) natively: targets with a stable ANAS-generated IQN, portals, initiator ACLs with one-way or mutual CHAP (secrets go to configfs, never onto a command line), and LUNs backed by a zvol or by a raw image file on a dataset or AHR pool. LUN serials and attributes survive every recreate, since that's how initiators (and PVE's own volids) recognise a disk. New targets start locked down: demo mode off, dynamic ACLs off, discovery closed to initiators not on the list. At boot the target comes up after ZFS volumes and AHR pools; a file-backed LUN whose filesystem didn't mount is quarantined and not served. Destroying a LUN's zvol, exporting its pool, or unmounting its filesystem is refused while the LUN exists, and the refusal names the LUN and the connected initiators.
• Share users — Samba user management for share access, over getent identities and nologin accounts. No role or permission system — PVE owns identity.

Protecting

• Backup to PBS — a task is files (shares, datasets, any mounted path) or block (one LUN per task, as a fixed-chunk .img archive), stored on a Proxmox Backup Server via proxmox-backup-client with dedup, encryption, retention and pruning. Repositories include the PBS storages PVE already knows about. File sources on ZFS and AHR are backed up from a snapshot, so a multi-hour run captures one instant; sources that can't be snapshotted (remote mounts, for instance) are backed up live and labeled as such. Nested filesystems under a source are detected and listed, and you choose which ones to include.
• Restore — selective file restore with a picker that browses the live tree and the archive catalog side by side, restoring into the original (matching files overwritten, the rest kept) or somewhere else. Whole-image LUN restore goes onto the original LUN, or onto a new LUN with a fresh serial on any target, leaving the source untouched. There's one Restore dialog, reachable from the LUN toolbar, the task grid or the repository, and it only asks for what it can't work out from where you opened it.
• Disk health — SMART and ZFS fused into a single per-disk status, with pool and vdev membership.

Consuming

• Mounts — client-side NFS/CIFS mounts with surgical fstab persistence (credentials in root-only files, never on a command line), a common option set across both protocols, human-readable file/dir permission modes, and on-demand (automount) mounting. Local, ZFS-, AHR- and PVE-owned mounts are inventoried read-only and labeled with what manages them.

Operating

• Dashboard — pool health, capacity, disk health, shares, running jobs and warnings, plus live telemetry: ARC, network throughput, and per-pool/per-disk I/O with latency for ZFS and AHR alike (the AHR strip breaks down to per-band and per-member throughput/IOPS/latency). The jobs strip and warning cards appear only when something is running or wrong.
• Jobs — every change is a queued job you can watch through to its result, including the multi-hour ones.
• Notifications — unattended runs (backup, snapshot schedules, replication) report through PVE's own notification system, per task: always, or on failure only.
• Cluster — cross-node traffic goes through each node's :8006: no extra port, no extra certificate. A version-skew banner names the versions when a newer UI meets an older daemon.

What ANAS is not

• Not a Proxmox replacement or fork. It installs onto a stock PVE node and adds panels to the UI that is already there.
• Not a NAS operating system or appliance. There's no second machine to boot, patch, or pass an HBA through to.
• Not a VM or container manager. Proxmox does that.
• Not a Ceph manager. pveceph owns Ceph. A mounted CephFS path can be shared like any other path; ANAS does nothing else with Ceph.
• Not an identity system. PVE owns the login, and there are no roles or permissions. The only accounts ANAS manages are Samba users for share access.
• Not a scheduler, notifier, or monitoring stack. systemd timers run the schedules and PVE's notification system delivers the messages.

How it's built (the guest philosophy)

ANAS treats your system as the source of truth and itself as a guest:

• No shadow state. Nothing is stored that the system doesn't already know. Pools come from zpool, shares from smb.conf/exports, schedules from systemd units. Uninstalling ANAS loses nothing.
• Surgical config editing. Config files are edited in place — comments, ordering, and hand-edits preserved byte-for-byte outside the touched lines. Never overwritten, never "owned".
• Leverage, don't rebuild. PVE's certificates, auth tickets, journald, systemd timers, notification system, and cluster filesystem are used as-is. ANAS builds no scheduler, no notifier, no user database.
• PVE territory is read-only. Pools, datasets, volumes and mounts that Proxmox manages are inventoried, labeled, and left alone; storage.cfg is parsed, never written.
• Two processes, one boundary. An API gateway (anas, plain HTTP on the loopback interface) fronts a system daemon (anasd, REST over a Unix socket). The gateway is reached through PVE's own :8006 front door under /anas (a fail-open reverse-proxy hook in pveproxy) — no separate origin, no extra certificate. All mutations are queued jobs; every operation is audited to journald with the requesting user's identity.
• Dangerous operations are gated. Destructive actions require an explicit confirmation code round-trip. An operation that would break something in use is refused, and the refusal says why and what to do instead.

Requirements

• Proxmox VE node (single node or cluster)
• Node.js ≥ 20 (installer can provide via --install-deps — the only thing that flag gates)
• ZFS ≥ 2.2 (ANAS uses zpool's JSON output)
• mdadm + btrfs-progs for Hybrid RAID, samba for SMB shares and share users, nfs-kernel-server for NFS exports, acl for permissions, targetcli-fb + python3-rtslib-fb for serving iSCSI block storage — the installer adds all of them, on fresh installs and upgrades alike (PVE ships none of them, and ANAS never gates a feature on its tools being absent)

Install

Grab a release tarball, untar it on the PVE node, and run the installer as root:

tar xzf anas-<version>.tar.gz
cd anas-<version>
sudo ./install.sh              # add --install-deps on a fresh node

The installer preflights the node without touching it, then performs a transactional install (dependencies → backup → install → health check → PVE UI integration) that rolls itself back completely on any failure. Re-running it is the upgrade path. ANAS is served through pveproxy on :8006 under /anas, so there is no separate origin and no extra certificate to accept — if the Proxmox web UI loads, ANAS does. See packaging/README.md for flags and uninstall.

Gateway port

The gateway binds a loopback port (default 3000) that only pveproxy talks to; it is never exposed and needs no certificate. If something else on the node already listens on 3000, pass another port:

sudo ./install.sh --port 3001

On a fresh install the installer auto-picks the next free port if 3000 is taken. The choice is written to /etc/default/anas and preserved across upgrades unless you pass --port again. It is per-node — nodes in a cluster need not agree, since cross-node traffic goes through each node's :8006.

Building from source

npm install
./packaging/make-release.sh    # builds, smoke-tests, and tars a release

Produces dist-release/anas-<version>.tar.gz. Versioning is semver with a single source of truth — see packaging/README.md.

Development

npm install
npm run dev     # anasd in mock mode (no real ZFS needed) + gateway with dev auth

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the workflow, tests (unit + Playwright against a disposable "stunt" PVE node), and project structure, and docs/ for the architecture (DESIGN.md), the non-negotiable design principles (PRINCIPLES.md), and the story backlog (EPICS.md).

License

ANAS is free software, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later) — the same license family as Proxmox VE itself. See LICENSE.

Copyright © 2026 Chris Cebelenski