alt Hacker NewsOP here. One thing we mentioned in the blog but probably didn’t emphasize enough is how deeply ZFS is integrated into the UI.
With Sylve, you rarely need to touch the CLI. Snapshots, datasets, ZVOLs, even flashing images directly to ZVOLs, it’s all handled from the UI in a straightforward way.
That tight ZFS integration also lets us build more flexible backup workflows. You can back up VMs, jails, or entire datasets to any remote machine that supports SSH + ZFS. This is powered by Zelta (https://zelta.space) (which is embedded directly into the Go backend), so it’s built-in rather than something you bolt on.
In Proxmox, you can achieve similar things, but it’s less intuitive and usually involves setting up additional components like Proxmox Backup Server.
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Do you have any opinions on how this works vs doing iSCSI to some other storage system using ZFS? That's how I've been handling Proxmox on the backend, and have mixed feelings. The GUI leaves a very great deal to be desired in honestly curious ways, have to touch the CLI a lot even for super basic networking or auth stuff, and of course neither side has the same insight to the data structures in question. Either you've got to do ZVOL instances and thus manual effort or scripting, or you give Proxmox a single big blob then let it manage that with LVM but that means the storage side can't give any granular help on snapshots and the like. It still can deal with data integrity and backups and storage redundancy and all that but no further, and some increased overhead. But on the other hand, I do feel like a really firm separation of concerns isn't without value. Having native support though is an interesting alternative I hadn't really considered.
I did actually notice the ZFS gui which is indeed something lacking in proxmox which doesn't default to ZFS in the installer. However once you do install it using ZFS it actually makes use of it pretty well and the user does not need to mess with the zfs cli tools much. Obviously it would be nice to have a GUI for all zfs operations too. Then again even TrueNAS refers you back to the cli for SOME operations.
On proxmox ZFS syncs do not require proxmox backup server, which actually has its own format which is very efficient in speed and disk space, but you do either need something like sanoid/syncoid or use of the shell.