Best Practice with Two Hard Drives on a Remote Server

[theprez1980]

Hey There -

Been running Proxmox at home for years and probably not in the best configuration. Now with a 1U server being colocated and setup remotely, I want to make sure I wire things up right before shipping it off.

My thought is to have two drives - in a hardware RAID 1 configuration, and using that as my boot drive and datastore for VMs/ISOs, etc.

However, searching the forums seems to suggest not to do that and I am curious why - is it a performance concern or something else?

Open to other ideas/best practices in case I'm doing it wrong....

Thanks

 

[VictorSTS]

searching the forums seems to suggest not to do that and I am curious why

Me too...

Use a battery backed RAID controller and two enterprise drives with PLP, install with default LVM Thin and it will work flawlessly. Having some kind of out of band management like IPMI / iLo / iDrac / BMC for peace of mind if something breaks is a big plus.

If you use non-enterprise drives and / or no battery you will have issues sooner than later (disks wearout, poor sync write performance, higher chance of data loss/corruption if system loses power or hangs...).

 

[gfngfn256]

As you must know Raid is not a backup. So what backup strategy are you going to employ? Offsite?

 

[theprez1980]

As you must know Raid is not a backup. So what backup strategy are you going to employ? Offsite?

Correct, it's not the sole backup strategy. The thought process was that it one drive was failing i'd have enough time to put in a "remote hands" ticket and have then swap it (the failing/failed drive) with one or the spares and rebuild the array.

The conflicting info on RAID for install had me concerned I was missing the big picture in terms of performance or incompatibly or something else.