[SOLVED] Add raid 1 to proxmox

[onam]

Hello forum,
I have this situation. I have 1 nvme where proxmox is installed, 2 HDD each 1TB. I have already configured two HDD as RAID 1 from the BIOS. PC is model dell 3660 Tower.

My question is, how do I make proxmox to recognize those two HDD?
And second, can I install VM strictly on the HDD because the nvme is only 256GB?

Below is my current setup on proxmox environment.

Any help would be really appreciated.

 

[Dunuin]

Hello forum,
I have this situation. I have 1 nvme where proxmox is installed, 2 HDD each 1TB. I have already configured two HDD as RAID 1 from the BIOS. PC is model dell 3660 Tower.

My question is, how do I make proxmox to recognize those two HDD?

Go to "YourNode -> Disks -> ZFS or LVM-Thin or Directory -> Add " in webUI select your raid array and format it with the storage of your choice.
But not sure if it works for your raid as PVE sees two individual disks instead of a single raid array.

As an alternative you could disable the raid in bios and let PVE create a raid1 using ZFS.

And second, can I install VM strictly on the HDD because the nvme is only 256GB?

Yes, but not really recommended as HDDs are slow as hell when hit with random IO. So not great to store virtual disks of guests.

 

[onam]

Go to "YourNode -> Disks -> ZFS or LVM-Thin or Directory -> Add " in webUI select your raid array and format it with the storage of your choice.

Thank you for the quick reply. Unfortunately when I got Disks->ZFS or LVM-thin or Directory -> Add , the RAID array does not show up. It shows "No disks unused". Have I missed something on the proxmox side or should I go to BIOS?

Yes, but not really recommended as HDDs are slow as hell when hit with random IO. So not great to store virtual disks of guests.

What do you suggest to use in this case, another nvme disk to keep these virtual disks? In this use case I wanted to use proxmox instance to serve two websites.

 

[Dunuin]

Thank you for the quick reply. Unfortunately when I got Disks->ZFS or LVM-thin or Directory -> Add the RAID array does not show up. It shows "No disks unused" Have I missed something on the proxmox side or should I go to BIOS?

PVE can only use disks that are empty/unpartitioned. But your software raid already wrote data to it, so that won't work without wiping the disks and wiping the individual disks is no option as you will loose your mainboards software raid.

What do you suggest to use in this case, another nvme storage? In this use case I wanted to use this to keep two websites.

You can test it. But I would always run PVE system and all guests on raid1 or raid10 to minimise downtime and dataloss. With SSDs for the guests.
HDDs or raid5/raid6 is fine if you just need some cheap big cold storage.

 

[onam]

Again very helpful. With your suggestion, I wiped the disks and it seems I am able to add those as LVM, LVM-Thin or Directory.

Is it possible to create a mirror raid array (RAID1) within the proxmox environment? I can make some compromises on the performance side.

 

[Dunuin]

Yes, PVE got ZFS for software raid. But ZFS shouldn't run ontop of another raid. So first disable all raid features in the bios, then wipe those two disks and create a zfs mirror with them.

If you also want to store files on the ZFS mirror, you will have to manually create a dataset and add its mountpoint as a directory storage. As a storage of type "zfspool" can only store virtual disks.

 

[onam]

Ok then, will do that. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. I will mark this as solved.

 

[Dunuin]

You can create a dataset with zfs create YourPoolName/NewDatasetName add a directory storage a "Datacenter -> Storage -> Add -> Directory". Also don't forget to run pvesm set YourDirectoryStorageId --is_mountpoint yes or you might run into problems when mounting the dataset fails.