Considering moving from ESXi to ProxMox

[axel2078]

Hello. I'm currently running an ESXi 7 home lab system and I'm contemplating replacing it with ProxMox. I am a ProxMox noob though. For my ESXi system, the boot drive is a USB flash drive, which works well, but from what I've been reading, that will NOT work so well with ProxMox. I have two 1 TB hard drives (not SSD) in that system, and 32 GB memory. What's the best way to install ProxMox and maximize my 2 hard drives? I watched a video online where someone said that you can't utilize local storage from the same hard drive that ProxMox is installed on. I'd hate to waste a 1 TB drive if that's true. Can someone tell me the best way to do this? Thanks.

 

[jsterr]

Hello. I'm currently running an ESXi 7 home lab system and I'm contemplating replacing it with ProxMox. I am a ProxMox noob though. For my ESXi system, the boot drive is a USB flash drive, which works well, but from what I've been reading, that will NOT work so well with ProxMox. I have two 1 TB hard drives (not SSD) in that system, and 32 GB memory. What's the best way to install ProxMox and maximize my 2 hard drives? I watched a video online where someone said that you can't utilize local storage from the same hard drive that ProxMox is installed on. I'd hate to waste a 1 TB drive if that's true. Can someone tell me the best way to do this? Thanks.

Thats not true. You can use the storage where your proxmox os is put also for vms. thats also the default after installing proxmox. You can use a zfs mirror for your 2x1TB to get 1TB net storage.

 

[Dunuin]

And yes, you shouldn't install PVE to a USB-Stick/SD-Card because PVE will write about 30GB per day and that would kill flash storages without wear leveling quite fast. But using a USB-SSD for example would work.

 

[axel2078]

Thats not true. You can use the storage where your proxmox os is put also for vms. thats also the default after installing proxmox. You can use a zfs mirror for your 2x1TB to get 1TB net storage.

Thanks for the info. Is 32 GB enough memory to run a ZFS mirror? I've read that it can be memory intensive and I don't want to use half my memory on ZFS. If I was running a ZFS mirror, is the OS itself contained in that mirror, or is it outside the mirror? I'm familiar with hardware RAID 1, but not so much with ZFS mirrors.

 

[Dunuin]

By default ZFS will use up to 50% of your RAM for its ARC. But if you only got 2x 1TB it should be fine to limit the ARC to something like 4 GB RAM. But the bigger your RAM, the faster your ZFS.

 

[axel2078]

By default ZFS will use up to 50% of your RAM for its ARC. But if you only got 2x 1TB it should be fine to limit the ARC to something like 4 GB RAM. But the bigger your RAM, the faster your ZFS.

Would it better to run this setup and limit the ARC to 4 GB, or just install as ext4 and use one disk for the data (VMs) and the other disk to hold backups? I just want to make sure I won't run into issues with only 32 GB of memory since I don't know much about ZFS.

 

[Dunuin]

Using ZFS would atleast prevent your OS/VM/userdata from corrupting over time and a single disk might fail without that you loose any data or something stops working. But ZFS will indeed need more RAM and will create more overhead (but atleast with HDDs you don'T need to care so much about wearing).

 

[axel2078]

Using ZFS would atleast prevent your OS/VM/userdata from corrupting over time and a single disk might fail without that you loose any data or something stops working. But ZFS will indeed need more RAM and will create more overhead (but atleast with HDDs you don'T need to care so much about wearing).

Thanks for the info. Given my hardware, would 32 GB be enough for ZFS and about 6-7 non-production VMs? (again, just a home lab)