Proxmox VE on microSD

[Xalvin]

Hello,

I'm building a test/training cluster in a lab. I have three Dell PowerEdge R640 servers with diskless backplanes. These servers are equipped with the IDSDM module, which can hold two microSD cards each.

My question is: could I install Proxmox VE on these microSD cards?

Keep in mind that I'm planning to buy high-endurance microSD cards, the kind designed for video surveillance. Also, this cluster won't be running 24/7; it will only be powered on occasionally.

What do you think? Would this be a viable solution?

 

[LnxBil]

I'm building a test/training cluster in a lab. I have three Dell PowerEdge R640 servers with diskless backplanes. These servers are equipped with the IDSDM module, which can hold two microSD cards each.

My question is: could I install Proxmox VE on these microSD cards?

Technically yes, but you will not have a lot of fun with them and they will fail.

Keep in mind that I'm planning to buy high-endurance microSD cards, the kind designed for video surveillance. Also, this cluster won't be running 24/7; it will only be powered on occasionally.

why a cluster when it will not be running 24/7? Makes no sense.


Install the OS on your raid disks and don't bother with microSD card install, problems and failures. You can spare yourself the lifetime.

 

[Xalvin]

Technically yes, but you will not have a lot of fun with them and they will fail.



why a cluster when it will not be running 24/7? Makes no sense.


Install the OS on your raid disks and don't bother with microSD card install, problems and failures. You can spare yourself the lifetime.

This cluster is only for testing purposes in our lab. It's built using spare parts, and we'll use it to test how vMotion works, along with a few other things.

Anyway, we'll probably go with Boot from SAN (iSCSI boot), using our external storage.

Thank you very much!

 

[BrickPelican]

I have three Dell PowerEdge R640 servers with diskless backplanes.

Hello, If there are really no drive bays, I'd look at a BOSS-S1 card for the R640. It takes two M.2 SATA drives in RAID 1 and is made exactly for booting. Even a small SSD on the internal USB port would last longer than microSD, Proxmox writes logs and cluster config all the time.

 

[Kingneutron]

Hello,

I'm building a test/training cluster in a lab. I have three Dell PowerEdge R640 servers with diskless backplanes. These servers are equipped with the IDSDM module, which can hold two microSD cards each.

My question is: could I install Proxmox VE on these microSD cards?

Keep in mind that I'm planning to buy high-endurance microSD cards, the kind designed for video surveillance. Also, this cluster won't be running 24/7; it will only be powered on occasionally.

What do you think? Would this be a viable solution?

https://search.brave.com/search?q=c...ersation=09ca7297cada46d8eb023befb0e6866153f4

You'd be vastly better off booting and running from usb3 external SSD. With Samsung T7 you should even be able to access SMART stats, but it might not support long tests.

 

[J-Rod]

Since high-endurance video surveillance microSD cards have very high ratings, and you'll probably get a 64GB/128GB card while PVE might only use 10GB leaving lots of spare capacity for wear leveling, I wouldn't have any major concerns using them in this context.

 

[BrickPelican]

Anyway, we'll probably go with Boot from SAN (iSCSI boot), using our external storage.

If you go that way, as far as I know the PVE ISO installer can't put the system on an iSCSI LUN, so people usually install plain Debian there first (its installer can log into the target) and add Proxmox on top. Also keep the boot NIC out of vmbr0 - moving that IP onto a bridge while root sits on iSCSI is an easy way to lose the disk.