Best strategy for storage managment

[Sestemybe]

Good evening,

I am looking for a little help and guidance with how to organize the storage on the Proxmox server I am putting together. This server is solely for home use, and for learning cloud computing, VE's, Containers, services, and multiple operating systems. So far I have planned a 2TB Samsung Evo NVME, a 2TB Samsung Evo SSD, and 4 8TB Western Digital Red NAS drives. I have been planning on installing Proxmox and all VE's/Containers onto the NVME drive using EXT4. I plan on backing up all the VE's and containers to the Samsung SSD formatted as EXT4. I am planning on using the 4 Western Digital drives in a ZFS pool to create a couple of large drives that I can then pass through to the VE's or Containers that require large amounts of bulk storage. I like the idea of using ZFS storage for the large drives that will be used for a Plex server, and a NAS folder that other devices can access on my network for the purpose of backups and storage. I am sure that I will run multiple different VE's and Containers as I find ones that interest me. Does anyone have some critiques or advice on the most headache free way to format and setup the storage for different purposes?

Thank you for your time, John

 

[Dunuin]

Consumer SSDs like the EVOs will wear very fast (you can kill them in a few months) and will show a terrible performance when confronted with alot of sync writes, like DBs and ZFS will do. Depending on your workload you should really think about getting some enterprise/datacenter grade SSDs. Enterprise SSDs also got a powerloss protection, so you won't loose your data on an power outage.

 

[bobmc]

OP is proposing to use EXT4 for SSD and NVME, while creating a ZFS pool on the WD HDD devices. So wearout should not be a major concern apart from log traffic generated by the Proxmox host - assuming the Samsung Evo SSD is the boot/OS drive.

I'd suggest the OP considers using LVM over ext4 as this gives the options of snapshots and thin provisioning. Personally, I'd also think about a small dedicated boot device (doesn't need to be big or fast) and a cron job to back up key config files in the event of any failures. Needless to say a mirror boot pool is also a good idea but it all depends on your budget/hardware/risk aversion

 

[Dunuin]

Your right that ext4 or LVM will wear the SSDs way less than ZFS, but I still wouldn't use consumer SSDs as a VM/LXC storage in case the OP plans to create some DB Containers or VMs or doesn't want to get a UPS.