Proxmox Disk Configuration

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stanfosd

New Member
Mar 30, 2025
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I'm not new to Proxmox, but looking to move more heavily into it in an enterprise environment, so that is a bit of a change for me.

I have a question revolving around disk configuration for the Proxmox PVE boot disk. I am planning a HA setup consisting of 3 nodes. Each node is planned to have 2x Epyc 9275F CPUs, 768GB RAM and, due to storage & performance needs, I am planning 8x 30.72TB NVME disks. Due to balancing capacity, performance and budgetary needs I would prefer to stick with the above 8x NVME disks. I am anticipating utilizing ZFS for my setup and using a 7 wide RaidZ2 with 1 hot spare. This should provide me with just over 100TB which should be sufficient for my needs.

My main question is, is it suitable to create a single disk environment with this setup that would contain my PVE boot as well as my VM storage, or is it strongly recommended to utilize separate disks for the PVE boot drives? Thanks in advance for any assistance on this.
 
I'm interested how you place the 8 of 30TB NVMe between 3 nodes? is each node contains 8 of 30TB NVMe? or just place all 8 of 30TB in 1 node and provide NFS export for other 2 nodes access?

In my own opinion, you can consider following options:
1. Choose ZFS RaidZ2 for 8 NVMes in Installation GUI, and then all disk will contains /boot to provide protection for any two disk failed.
2. Choose ZFS Raid1 for 2 NVMes in installation GUI, so two disk will contains /boot to provide protection for any one boot disk failed. then create another RaidZ2 Pool for the rest 6 NVMes.
3. Did you think about distribute NVMe evenly on 3 nodes, and setup CEPH for this cluster? But for this option you need 2 additional HDD use for each node's boot disk.
 
In my build, each node will have 8x 30TB NVME. I looked into CEPH early on, but due to the recommended number of nodes I felt that ZFS was going to cover my needs.

I am tentatively planning on going with route 1 - setting up RaidZ2 during Proxmox install. I simply am not sure if that is a recommended and supported method, or if I am strongly recommended to add 2 separate drives for the Proxmox OS install.
 
with that budget for hardware you should really go with seperate boot drives, they don't need to have much capacity, be extremely fast or extra durable, just make sure they have plp.
 
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my concern wasnt necessarily budget, but available drive bays as I was originally going to go with a pool for NVME and a pool of spnners. However, I have reconfigured to only NVME and now have available drive slots and just wasnt sure of the ideal build. I do feel much more comfortable with dedicated OS disks. Thanks all!
 
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