Best practices on setting up Proxmox on a new server

[everdaniel]

Hi everyone!

(very) new Proxmox user here, we recently bought a brand new server to use in our Lab to do our research work, it's an HP DL380 Gen10 server, with 2 Intel Xeon Gold 6242R processors (3.1Ghz), 256GB of RAM, 2 240GB SATA SSD drives, 2 960GB SATA SSD drives and 4 2.4TB SAS 10k drives.

I wanted to hear from more experienced users what are the recommendations and/or best practices regarding setting up Proxmox?

Our use case is, primarily, to run numerical models (weather/climate and hydrological models) so a lot of CPU/RAM/IO usage, we also anticipate a lot of storage use which is the reason we asked for 4 >2TB drivers however, we plan to complement the server with a separate Synology NAS storage that we already have (8 bay NAS with 8x8TB drives).

We know that for the kind of usage it's always better to run the models on bare metal but we want to have the flexibility of being able to play a bit, and since physical access to this server is limited, then that's why we want to use Proxmox so that we can play with new things without the need of re-installing everything.

Thank you!

 

[Dominic]

Which storage controller do you have in your server? In general ZFS is a good choice, but it does use 50% of the host memory for caching by default. Depending on how much memory you need for your computations and the controller, other storage technologies might be interesting as well.