Best Practice Boot Drive

[lobbies]

Building a Server, all options are on the table.

HBA card installed, enterprise SSD Sata in mirrored configuration for the DATA.

For the Boot Drive. (Drives would also be Enterprise) I know all of the following options would work, I am just looking for the Best choice. Best/Easiest to monitor and recover from if there is an issue.

- Can use 2 x SSD Sata or M.2 drives, set up Mirrored configuration during proxmox install (ZFS Software RAID).
- Add a Raid Card specifically for the boot drive - Raid1
- Lenovo Server - The boot drives can be set up using the Servers Software RAID1.
- 2 x NVME drives on a RAID PCI card setup as RAID1.

What is the "Book" move?

Thanks again,

 

[justinclift]

Personally speaking, if you're definitely wanting to use mirrored drives for the OS then I'd recommend using the ZFS mirror approach that the Proxmox installer can set up.

As an idea for a slightly different approach though, with my 1U rack mount systems, they can take 8x hot swap drives.

So I just have identical SSDs in all 8 bays, with the Proxmox OS spread all across all 8 of them using ZFS. ie. it'll boot from any of them, it doesn't care which.

Went with that approach because the way Proxmox sets up ZFS, is it puts the OS on the first part of each drive then makes the remainder of the drives available as a shared ZFS pool (rpool) for VMs, containers, etc.

Super easy to manage that way, and it maximises the available space vs having to set two drives aside just for the OS.

 

[davemcl]

I always go with 2 x M.2 drives for boot, easy to setup and doesnt waste precious drive slots.