Home server project. (Questions regarding storage setup)

danell

New Member
Feb 5, 2013
1
0
1
First of all, I am a real newbie to this, so please bare with me, and please don't just direct me to google.


I have a server with a 500 gb sata disk, and a raid consisting of 4x 2TB hdd in raid 5 (hardware raid). It is just an old dual core pc with some extra disks and a raid card.


Anyhow, I was fiddeling with the thought of turning it into a multipurpose home server.
By surfing some around I came across Proxmox, but with hours of internet trawling, I still have some questions regarding what directions I should take in my setup.
I want to setup a file server who serves my home network with media files and users personal file storage.
I also want to set up, mail server, web server and so forth (other suggestions is gratefully received).


My question is:
What is the best practice in term of storage setup? (mainly openvz, but maybe kvm in the future)


My thoughts are:
Install proxmox on the 500GB server and run all my servers/containers from there?
Then partition my raid with lvm in one big volume and mount it to my fileservers container?


...or is the best practice to put the containers directly on my big raid and store all the data


directly inside the containers? (my fileserver will consume the most of the storage)


...or is the best practice some other solution?




Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.


Best regards
Danell
 
Firstly, check the hardware RAID compatibility for PM VE. That caught me off guard before. A decent brand RAID card is important here (ie. LSI, Adaptec, etc.). There's a page on the Wiki with a list of adapters that have been tested.

Once you have a RAID setup in place, PM just sees it as a local drive. How you use it is really up to you, but I'd be inclined to just create OpenVZ containers on the RAID array, so you can easily backup, restore, migrate, etc. as you need. Although you could use iSCSI, NFS, etc. I'm not sure why you would want to with a home network. Just be careful that the version of PM that you are using can recognize more than 2TB of disk for a single volume. The older versions (ie. pre 2.0) could not.

Myles
 
First of all, I am a real newbie to this, so please bare with me, and please don't just direct me to google.


I have a server with a 500 gb sata disk, and a raid consisting of 4x 2TB hdd in raid 5 (hardware raid). It is just an old dual core pc with some extra disks and a raid card.


Anyhow, I was fiddeling with the thought of turning it into a multipurpose home server.
By surfing some around I came across Proxmox, but with hours of internet trawling, I still have some questions regarding what directions I should take in my setup.
I want to setup a file server who serves my home network with media files and users personal file storage.
I also want to set up, mail server, web server and so forth (other suggestions is gratefully received).


My question is:
What is the best practice in term of storage setup? (mainly openvz, but maybe kvm in the future)


My thoughts are:
Install proxmox on the 500GB server and run all my servers/containers from there?
Then partition my raid with lvm in one big volume and mount it to my fileservers container?


...or is the best practice to put the containers directly on my big raid and store all the data


directly inside the containers? (my fileserver will consume the most of the storage)


...or is the best practice some other solution?




Thank you in advance for any help you can provide.


Best regards
Danell
Hi,
your pve-installation should also protected by an raid - if your configs are gone, you will spend some time to get all your VMs/CTs back in live.
I have done following on a homeserver:
Create an small raidvolume - like 50-100GB for the pve installation.
Create one big raid-volume (the whole space) for an lvm-storage.
On this lvm-storage you can create an logical volume which is mounted for additional local space (used for CTs). The remaining space can used for kvm or for expanding the filesystem-lv.

Your single disk is fine for backups...

Udo
 
Hi,
your pve-installation should also protected by an raid - if your configs are gone, you will spend some time to get all your VMs/CTs back in live.
I have done following on a homeserver:
Create an small raidvolume - like 50-100GB for the pve installation.
Create one big raid-volume (the whole space) for an lvm-storage.
On this lvm-storage you can create an logical volume which is mounted for additional local space (used for CTs). The remaining space can used for kvm or for expanding the filesystem-lv.


Udo

Hi Udo,

not to hijack this thread, but I have just done the setup you described.. Raid 10 with two volumes. 60GB used as pve install. and the rest mounted as lvm using the steps from the wiki. For some reason though I can only put my kvm vms on it and not containers

How do mount/format the larger raid array so I can use it for both containers and lvm??

thanks
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Hi Udo,

not to hijack this thread, but I have just done the setup you described.. Raid 10 with two volumes. 60GB used as pve install. and the rest mounted as lvm using the steps from the wiki. For some reason though I can only put my kvm vms on it and not containers

How do mount/format the larger raid array so I can use it for both containers and lvm??

thanks
Hi,
like I wrote before - create an logical volume on this volumegroup, format as ext3 (or ext4), mount and define as local storage (like 2TB for volumegroup and 1TB for openvz-lv).
A volumegroup (lvm-storage) hasn't a filesystem - this is the reason why you can't use it for backups/templates/iso and so on.

Udo
 
Hi,
like I wrote before - create an logical volume on this volumegroup, format as ext3 (or ext4), mount and define as local storage (like 2TB for volumegroup and 1TB for openvz-lv).
A volumegroup (lvm-storage) hasn't a filesystem - this is the reason why you can't use it for backups/templates/iso and so on.

Udo

Thanks Udo
 

About

The Proxmox community has been around for many years and offers help and support for Proxmox VE, Proxmox Backup Server, and Proxmox Mail Gateway.
We think our community is one of the best thanks to people like you!

Get your subscription!

The Proxmox team works very hard to make sure you are running the best software and getting stable updates and security enhancements, as well as quick enterprise support. Tens of thousands of happy customers have a Proxmox subscription. Get yours easily in our online shop.

Buy now!