Best Practice... Install additional storage drive.

[rellek74]

Hey Gang...

I have a basic Proxmox setup (8.0.4). The server has an 500GB nvme drive with the default set up of:

• local
  • 100gb
• local-lvm
  • 400gb

I'm a 2TB SATA SSD drive to the mix, and wondering the best way to set it up to be able to:

• Store more VM's (less active)
• Store Backups
  • all VM's
  • nvme files (isos, templates)
• Flexibility to store other files

What are you suggestions? Manually add a partition ZFS and Directory? Thanks for your input!

 

[leesteken]

What kind flash does the SSD use? Is it an enterprise SSD with PLP: use it for VMs. Is it an cheap QLC SSD: only use it to store files that are read a lot but don't write often to it.

 

[rellek74]

What kind flash does the SSD use? Is it an enterprise SSD with PLP: use it for VMs. Is it an cheap QLC SSD: only use it to store files that are read a lot but don't write often to it.

It's a Samsung EVO 980 Pro.

 

[Dunuin]

Like already said, without a proper Enterprise grade SSD with PLP using ZFS might be a bit disappointing (slower and faster failing SSD).
And for backups you usually want a dedicated disk unless you got backups of those backups somewhere else. So not great to mix VM/data storage and backup storage.

It's a Samsung EVO 980 Pro

So no proper SSD for ZFS. You can of cause use it with ZFS, but don't expect too much and don't put a high load on it. Depeding on the workload it might be nearly as slow as a HDD and fail within a few months or years. Especially try not to run any services with DBs on it to reduce sync writes.

 

[rellek74]

Right, I'm thinking more of a snapshop storage. Actually backups will be elsewhere.

So should I partition the drive and use LVM and Directory?

 

[Dunuin]

Right, I'm thinking more of a snapshop storage.

Snapshots are always part of the storage you are snapshoting. So you can't store your snapshots from the NVMe SSD on the SATA SSD.

So should I partition the drive and use LVM and Directory?

Depends on your needs for the ZFS features and data integrity. If you care about your data and the features use ZFS but be ready to restore backups and to replace the disk. If you don't care about those I would stick with LVM-Thin and Directory storage on etx4/xfs for better performance and longer lasting SSD.

 

[leesteken]

So should I partition the drive and use LVM and Directory?

No need to partition for LVM. Initialize it asLVM, create a partition on LVM and mount that as a directory storage.

 

[rellek74]

Thanks all, I set it up as a single Directory partition which will allow me to use it for whatever I decide to throw at it. (That isn't liquid!)