Best use of SSDs for homelab?

sae

Active Member
Sep 18, 2016
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0
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Hi all,

Getting my toes wet with Proxmox and ZFS here. I've installed Proxmox on a 64 GB Supermicro SATA DOM, and I'm still deciding how best to use my other storage devices. Other than the boot DOM, I have two SATA 800GB S3700s ready to be deployed, and 4 SATA 2TB drives.

I'll have 64GB of memory to work with, with only 32GB earmarked for VMs, which could mean for a 32GB ARC if it were be advantageous.

So far, the only scenarios I've considered are:
  1. put all drives (except the boot drive) on a big ZFS pool, including VM storage. Have the SSDs in RAID0 and split the drives to between L2ARC, swap, and ZIL.
  2. keep one 800GB S3700 as VM storage, the other for L2ARC, swap, and ZIL for the ZFS pool. Backup the VMs to the pool nightly.
  3. use half of the two 800GB drives in a mirror, use the rest for L2ARC/ZIL/swap. This seems to best match the recommended ratio for ARC to L2ARC sizing, but it also seems to increase the failure points, but maybe I'm not thinking about it right.

My plan is to migrate a database server in at some point, which serves as an analytics platform, which involves long running, swap intensive queries. Ideally, I would budget for some PCIe flash storage, but maybe we can revisit that later.

Thanks for any input.
 

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