Beginner Seeking Advice: Optimizing NVMe Performance in Proxmox for VMs

[itlinux]

Hello,

I am currently stuck in the middle of migrations.

We purtchased the GRAID RAID card, but after months of trying it to get working, we diverted to postpone our porxmox migration by a year and we run VMware with the SSDs splitted per VM with heavy backups.


I also found a hardware issue in the setup - one of the drives was only connecting by Gen3 x2 lane and was slowing down the whole ZFS pool.

I will try to setup the ZFS again during the year.

Hello Simone, I can help you on the setup. Not sure what issue you had but ping me I will be happy to share. Graid RAID can be used for your VMs, I put together an article coming out soon with steps on how to make it work, Proxmox 8.x with Graid Technology.

 

[Kelleyo]

Hello Proxmox community,

I hope you all are doing well. I'm writing to seek your advice and guidance on an issue that's been giving me a bit of a challenge. I've just started exploring Proxmox, and while it's been an exciting journey so far, I could really use your collective wisdom on a specific point.

We've got a Gigabyte R272-Z34 server (https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/Rack-Server/R272-Z34-rev-100) with an AMD EPYC 7H12 processor, 512GB RAM, and 24 SAMSUNG MZWLJ1T9HBJR-00007 P2 drives.

For some additional context, we've been using VMware for our other servers and we're considering switching to Proxmox with this new machine. So, I'm relatively new to this platform and still getting my bearings.

The goal is to get the best possible performance from these NVMe drives. We've set up a software RAID within Proxmox and initially tried RAID10, but we're open to other suggestions if they might work better.

I ran a write speed test with this command: dd if=/dev/zero of=/nvme/test1.img bs=5G count=1 oflag=dsync. The result was about 1.7GB/s when run directly in Proxmox SSH, but when the same test was performed inside a Linux VM, the speed dropped to about 833MB/s. I am not sure if this test is the best, but it shows a difference.

Now, I'm not even sure if 1.7GB/s is the best speed we could be getting directly in Proxmox, so I'm hoping to understand how we can optimize this setup further.

I'd really appreciate any advice on how to configure the RAID for better performance or general Proxmox configurations that could be beneficial. Any suggestions for more effective benchmarking tools or methods would also be incredibly helpful.

Thank you so much for your time and help. I'm eager to learn from your expertise.

Kind regards
Simon Cechacek

Hello Simone, Graid now has full support for Proxmox: https://www.graidtech.com/supremeraid-proxmox-guide-2024/ Also our support for Support for Proxmox VE 8.2 with kernel 6.8 is confirmed in the Graid SupremeRAID™ 1.6 release, which will be available next week