Conflicting info on memory requirement ZFS

[karel1980]

Hi,

According to the wiki you need at least 8gb of ram for ZFS. As I understand the 1GB per TB of ZFS is only relevant if you use deduplication. (Source, last reaction)


I am planning on installing proxmox on a 2x500gb ssds but only have 16GB of memory. Can you confirm that if I use these disks in raid 1 zfs for installation of proxmox, deduplication is turned off? And thus the memory requirements are significantly lower as described on the wiki?

Thanks for your time.

 

[fabian]

Hi,

According to the wiki you need at least 8gb of ram for ZFS. As I understand the 1GB per TB of ZFS is only relevant if you use deduplication. (Source, last reaction)

no. ZFS with too little memory used for ARC will perform very bad, especially with virtualization work loads.

I am planning on installing proxmox on a 2x500gb ssds but only have 16GB of memory. Can you confirm that if I use these disks in raid 1 zfs for installation of proxmox, deduplication is turned off? And thus the memory requirements are significantly lower as described on the wiki?

Thanks for your time.

PVE will not setup ZFS deduplication unless you set it yourself. with 16GB of total memory for system, guests and ARC you likely won't be very happy with performance, unless you are mainly running lightweight container work loads. note that for a plain file server, requirements are different. you can definitely run a file server with ZFS with 8 or 16GB of memory. it won't be the fastest box on the planet, but for most home/office use cases it will be fine.

 

[karel1980]

Thanks for your reply, I will be running at most 2/3 vms, nothing high usage, as you said home use. It sounds like I can better then go for a single disk ext4, can you confirm?

once again thanks for you help