Hi all,
I need some advice. I have HP ProDesk 600 G3 with i5-7500T that I am turning into home server. It has 40GB RAM and one 2TB NVMe SSD + one 2TB SATA SSD. The HVMe drive is of course much faster than the SATA drive (2000+ MB/s vs 450 - 500 MB/s). I want to use the machine to put my Nextcloud AIO docker installation plus want to play with other VMs and also have a SMB file server. proxmox is installed on the NVMe drive (was the only drive when installed) with majority of it defined as LVM Thin pool where VM disks are. I've created another LVM Thin pool on the second SATA drive but it is empty. I managed to share the Intel 630 GPU to the to-be Next cloud AIO VM (Ubuntu server, stripped down from everything including SNAP). Have couple of other such VMs for other purposes. So I was thinking to create a SMB VM with two 1.5TB virtual disk, each on different physical disk and have a mdadm RAID 1 from both and use that as main storage target for the NC AIO and for the SMB shares. Question is - what happens if one of the physical drives fail? If the secondary one fails - I loose one of the virtual disks but the array survives. Put another disk in, create a new virtual one, add to the VM, rebuild the array. All good.
What happens however if the main drive fails - the one where proxmox is installed? I will still have the LVM Thin pool on the secondary drive with the virtual disk on it. So in theory I should be able to put new NVMe, reinstall proxmox, create the VM again, add empty virtul drive on the new disk, mount the surviving virtual drive from the secondary disk and rebuild the array again. However - I ave no clue if the new proxmox installation will be able to recognize and use the LVM Thin pool that was created from the first installation. So - will it? Can this scenario work? Other problems with it are the speed of the array will be slower due to the slower secondary disk compared to using only one virtual drive on the NVMe only. The data on the surviving partition can be accessed only through VM not directly.
Alternatively, I do not do a raid, store things initially only on the NVMe virtual drive and use rsynch to copy all data on regular basis on the virtual disk on the secondary drive. This just avoids the rebuilding of the array. And speed will be best. Still suffers from the problem with accessing the second virtual drive from a new VM if the primary drive fails.
Third option is - again store only on virtual drive on the primary disk but rsynch not on a virtual disk but on a normal partition on the secondary disk. So if primary disk fails, the data can be easily accessed without use of VM. Problem with that is I have to reserve the whole space initially for the secondary drive and I lose the benefit of the dynamic storage allocation provided by the thin provisioning. And I do not know how much the data will grow in next couple of years plus I want to use the space for other VMs...
So what is the most reasonable option? Are there other options? The machine cannot take any moe disks, just to make that clear.
Thank in advance for any advice or information! I am quite new to proxmox and I have to say things have evolved quite significantly in last 8 to 10 years since I had time to "play" with virtualization under Linux - still remember migration my old VMs from Xen to KVM back then when CenOS change the hypervisor in newer version
Things are great now! Fantastic job from the whole proxmox team/community - KUDOS!!!
I need some advice. I have HP ProDesk 600 G3 with i5-7500T that I am turning into home server. It has 40GB RAM and one 2TB NVMe SSD + one 2TB SATA SSD. The HVMe drive is of course much faster than the SATA drive (2000+ MB/s vs 450 - 500 MB/s). I want to use the machine to put my Nextcloud AIO docker installation plus want to play with other VMs and also have a SMB file server. proxmox is installed on the NVMe drive (was the only drive when installed) with majority of it defined as LVM Thin pool where VM disks are. I've created another LVM Thin pool on the second SATA drive but it is empty. I managed to share the Intel 630 GPU to the to-be Next cloud AIO VM (Ubuntu server, stripped down from everything including SNAP). Have couple of other such VMs for other purposes. So I was thinking to create a SMB VM with two 1.5TB virtual disk, each on different physical disk and have a mdadm RAID 1 from both and use that as main storage target for the NC AIO and for the SMB shares. Question is - what happens if one of the physical drives fail? If the secondary one fails - I loose one of the virtual disks but the array survives. Put another disk in, create a new virtual one, add to the VM, rebuild the array. All good.
What happens however if the main drive fails - the one where proxmox is installed? I will still have the LVM Thin pool on the secondary drive with the virtual disk on it. So in theory I should be able to put new NVMe, reinstall proxmox, create the VM again, add empty virtul drive on the new disk, mount the surviving virtual drive from the secondary disk and rebuild the array again. However - I ave no clue if the new proxmox installation will be able to recognize and use the LVM Thin pool that was created from the first installation. So - will it? Can this scenario work? Other problems with it are the speed of the array will be slower due to the slower secondary disk compared to using only one virtual drive on the NVMe only. The data on the surviving partition can be accessed only through VM not directly.
Alternatively, I do not do a raid, store things initially only on the NVMe virtual drive and use rsynch to copy all data on regular basis on the virtual disk on the secondary drive. This just avoids the rebuilding of the array. And speed will be best. Still suffers from the problem with accessing the second virtual drive from a new VM if the primary drive fails.
Third option is - again store only on virtual drive on the primary disk but rsynch not on a virtual disk but on a normal partition on the secondary disk. So if primary disk fails, the data can be easily accessed without use of VM. Problem with that is I have to reserve the whole space initially for the secondary drive and I lose the benefit of the dynamic storage allocation provided by the thin provisioning. And I do not know how much the data will grow in next couple of years plus I want to use the space for other VMs...
So what is the most reasonable option? Are there other options? The machine cannot take any moe disks, just to make that clear.
Thank in advance for any advice or information! I am quite new to proxmox and I have to say things have evolved quite significantly in last 8 to 10 years since I had time to "play" with virtualization under Linux - still remember migration my old VMs from Xen to KVM back then when CenOS change the hypervisor in newer version
Things are great now! Fantastic job from the whole proxmox team/community - KUDOS!!!
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Thanks in advance!