Best way to configure storage.

[Brim]

Hello,

I am relative new to Proxmox VE and I am reconfiguring my server.
My question is, what would be the best way to setup my storage?

I have a Dell PowerEdge r720XD, the specs are:
-RAM: 96GB DDR3 1666MHz
-CPU's: 2x Intel Xeon E5-2640 2.5GHz
-Storage: 7x 1TB HDD SAS drives 7200RPM
1X 100GB SATA SSD
The drives are all connected trough a Dell PERC H710P Mini RAID Controller
They are all configured separate as Virtual Drives.

My intended use is a few Virtual machines that are used to host certain things and 2 VM's that has gpu-passtrough.
I want to store my ISO's separate and have a way to backup everything.

Currently I am in the setup of the Proxmox VE 7.2.1 install.
If you need more information please ask

Kind regards
Brim.

 

[Dunuin]

I personally would get a pair of enterprise SSDs to use as your VM storage. Otherwise the bad IOPS performance of HDDs can easily be the main bottleneck.

In case you want to use ZFS as software raid you should use a HBA and not a raid controller. Some Perc H710 can be crossflashed to a HBA firmware with IT-mode. See for example here: https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc.html

If you dont want to crossflash it or buy a HBA you would be limited to LVM-Thin ontop of a HW raid. And in that case I would use a HW raid10 to get some more IOPS. Technically you could run ZFS ontop of raid controllers but it isn't recommended as described in the documentation: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-d...uning/Hardware.html#hardware-raid-controllers

And for backups you might want a dedicated pool/array so you don't loose your VMs and backups at the same time when your array/pool fails.

If you setup a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) you could do incremental/deduplicated backups. Without a PBS you are limited to Vzdump backups and there each backups needs the full space, so your backup storage should be a multiple of the size of your VM storage.

So if you dont want to buy new hardware I would use two HDDs in a HW raid1 with LVM-Thin ontop for your PVE root FS combined with VM storage. And then remaining 5 HDD (or just 4 and you keep one HDDs as a cold spare) as a HW raid5 to store your backups.

But I really would recommend to get new disks. Neither way you wouldn't get good results with your existing disks.