fileserver vm and direct access

Fr0ggynator

New Member
Jan 31, 2014
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0
1
Hello,

i'm thinking about setting up a new proxmox host based on a C2750. Unfortunately the chip doesn't support Vt-d. So pci pass-through isn't available.

The board has 6 SATA ports onboard. I would like to have a dedicated fileserver-VM with direct access to 4 disks.

I am not sure where but I think i read once that you don't need vt-d for sata pass through as it's not a pci extension. I think this sounds weird that's why i'm asking to verify.

Are there any possibilities to give direct access to some hard disks to the fileserver vm? I just don't want any vhds of 2TB or more...

Thanks very much
 
Hello Fr0ggynator

you don't need vt-d for sata pass through as it's not a pci extension.

It is not a PCI card, but SATA controllers are usually controlled by the PCI bus.

Have a look with

Code:
lspci | grep SATA

I cannot say (maybe somebody else in the forum knows it for sure) if there is another possibility than VT-d to access directly - but probably not.

kind regards

Mr.Holmes
 
Hello Mr. Holmes,

thank you for your reply.

I just want to add another question:
Do you think that a WD Red 2,5" drive will be a bottleneck for multiple VMs? Their workload shouldn't be too much mostle file syncing and a zimbra server.

kind regards
 
Hello Fr0ggynator

Do you think that a WD Red 2,5" drive will be a bottleneck for multiple VMs? Their workload shouldn't be too much mostle file syncing and a zimbra server.

kind regards

Difficult to say, depends on amount of disk-access, and I don´t know how your applications work in detail. In any case it´s safer to have the virtual disks distributed across more physical disks.

I usually check what top (in host as well as in vm) says:

Code:
top - 18:40:04 up  6:43,  1 user,  load average: 0.09, 0.05, 0.07
Tasks: 306 total,   1 running, 305 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  5.0 us,  0.4 sy,  0.0 ni, 94.3 id,  [COLOR=#ff0000]0.3 wa[/COLOR],  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   8081628 total,  5717660 used,  2363968 free,   107668 buffers
KiB Swap:   917496 total,   107624 used,   809872 free,  1112884 cached

If the value of wa(it) is not permanently > 10 (here only 0.3!) I´m not worried ....

Kind regards

Mr.Holmes
 
...
Are there any possibilities to give direct access to some hard disks to the fileserver vm? I just don't want any vhds of 2TB or more...
Hi,
why not?

With direct attached devices to the fileserver you loose the chance to migrate the vm (if your storage is shared).
I have fileserver with many TBs of virtual disks (the biggest is an archive-server with 54TB).


Udo
 

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