Disk configuration recommendations

[sled]

Hello there,

I'm new to Proxmox and building my first server based on a HP Microserver Gen8 with a Xeon E3-1265L V2 and 16GB RAM. The server has 4 drive bays + 1 optical drive bay, 5 SATA III ports in total.

My goal is to use the server as a "Devops" machine running LXC containers only, primarily Gitea, Jenkins and a Docker Registry. I plan to backup the data to a NAS in a regular interval.

My question is what kind of disks should I use for what and in which configuration on my 5 SATA ports, currently I have the following empty disks:

SATA Port 0: <Free>
SATA Port 1: 1TB SSD, Samsung 860 Pro
SATA Port 2: 1TB SSD, Samsung 860 Pro
SATA Port 3: 1TB HDD Seagate Skyhawk or 4TB HDD WD RED
SATA Port 4: 1TB HDD Seagate Skyhawk or 4TB HDD WD Red

The Skyhawk drives came with the server and were used for surveillance cameras, maybe the WD Reds are a better choice for my application.
I could also populate SATA Port 0 with another SSD as the boot drive.

Should I put the containers on the boot drive and use the SSDs and HDDs in a mirror configuration for fast/slow mountable volumes on the containers?

What would you recommend out of experience?

Thanks!

 

[Vladimir Bulgaru]

Hello there,

I'm new to Proxmox and building my first server based on a HP Microserver Gen8 with a Xeon E3-1265L V2 and 16GB RAM. The server has 4 drive bays + 1 optical drive bay, 5 SATA III ports in total.

My goal is to use the server as a "Devops" machine running LXC containers only, primarily Gitea, Jenkins and a Docker Registry. I plan to backup the data to a NAS in a regular interval.

My question is what kind of disks should I use for what and in which configuration on my 5 SATA ports, currently I have the following empty disks:

SATA Port 0: <Free>
SATA Port 1: 1TB SSD, Samsung 860 Pro
SATA Port 2: 1TB SSD, Samsung 860 Pro
SATA Port 3: 1TB HDD Seagate Skyhawk or 4TB HDD WD RED
SATA Port 4: 1TB HDD Seagate Skyhawk or 4TB HDD WD Red

The Skyhawk drives came with the server and were used for surveillance cameras, maybe the WD Reds are a better choice for my application.
I could also populate SATA Port 0 with another SSD as the boot drive.

Should I put the containers on the boot drive and use the SSDs and HDDs in a mirror configuration for fast/slow mountable volumes on the containers?

What would you recommend out of experience?

Thanks!

Hey!

All depends on the size of the containers and the purpose of the storage. If the backup won't be done on server storage, but rather on external NAS, it makes less sense to have WD Red drives in there. On the other hand, if you need plenty of storage space, it makes sense to have bigger disks rather than smaller ones. Similarly when it comes to speed: if you need fast storage - go for SSDs and if you don't care about speed - go for bigger space.

As for the filesystem - i would strongly recommend ZFS, but it'd be best to have 4 identical drives and set them in RAIDZ2 or RAID10. You can set 2 pools in RAID1, but this would decrease the write speeds considerably when compared to RAID10.

Good luck!