[SOLVED] [Disks] Proxmox new setup question

[mrg]

Hello everyone,

We are about to move away from our cpanel environment to a proxmox setup.

The new server (Advance-3) from OVH
-------------
Processor: Intel Xeon-D 2141I - 8c/ 16t - 2.2GHz/ 3GHz
Memory: 32GB DDR4 ECC 2133MHz
Storage: 2x500GB SSD NVMe Soft RAID

This will be a single server setup, we are a pretty small company hosting 15-25 websites / emails.
we have the funding to either increase: 64GB ram OR drive setup of 2x4TB HDD SATA Soft RAID + 2x500GB SSD NVMe Soft RAID

Current Cpanel stats:

Memory Used

18.13% (5,980,528 of 32,994,736)

/home

/home

10% (282,050,172 of 2,863,476,216)

Would we benefit more from additional drives for more raid redundancy? or more memory?
Iv read that more memory is better but the stats above from my current server I feel that 32gb should be plenty for ZFS to work from?

Thanks in advance.

 

[oguz]

hi,

I feel that 32gb should be plenty for ZFS to work from?

32G is good for ZFS.

This will be a single server setup, we are a pretty small company hosting 15-25 websites / emails.

if you're going to be running mostly containers, then you probably don't need that much extra ram.

it all depends on your use case and server load. is there going to be a need for a lot of storage, for website content and emails and so on? if yes then you might benefit more from storage.

raid redundancy is also an option, but if you're going to use ZFS don't use hardware raid.

 

[mrg]

hi,



32G is good for ZFS.


if you're going to be running mostly containers, then you probably don't need that much extra ram.

it all depends on your use case and server load. is there going to be a need for a lot of storage, for website content and emails and so on? if yes then you might benefit more from storage.

raid redundancy is also an option, but if you're going to use ZFS don't use hardware raid.

Hi Oguz,
Thank you for the reply really appreciate it.

Use case for this server is 15 odd websites content and emails. as above my cpanel server barely touched resources, that was my real concern going from cpanel to proxmox which the differences would really be.

I would like to run Raid 1 on the 2 x 500gb nvmes so if one drive fails.

What is the reason for not running hardware raid with ZFS? mine would be soft raid but my friends asked as hes a vmware guy so proxmox is new to him.

do you have a list of files that should be backed up i.e vm configs, etc in the event of a DR scenario.
Currently use Jetbackup on my cpanel box that I have setup to grab all config files needed to rebuild.

I Would like the same kind of DR recovery that if hardware failed i could simply get another proxmox server and load my backups and configs is this something proxmox can offer or possible?

Kind regards

 

[oguz]

do you have a list of files that should be backed up i.e vm configs, etc in the event of a DR scenario.

for the VM, CT configs and PVE related files, /etc/pve is where everything is saved mostly. also you should backup /var/lib/pve-cluster/config.db (this db file is holding everything in /etc/pve)

What is the reason for not running hardware raid with ZFS? mine would be soft raid but my friends asked as hes a vmware guy so proxmox is new to him.

zfs needs direct control over the disks for handling volume management, snapshots etc. so it's not recommended or logical to use it in conjunction with hardware raid (it also doesn't improve anything)

if hardware failed i could simply get another proxmox server and load my backups and configs is this something proxmox can offer or possible?

you can also make use of shared storage to hold your virtual disks/volumes. this makes more sense with a cluster though, so maybe not applicable in your scenario.
backing up config.db should be enough in most cases

 

[mrg]

Thats brilliant Oguz thank you, will make sure i take a note of those locations and have them backed up.