Drives - migrating from mergerfs to...?

[ilovetoad]

I'm still learning about proxmox and wanted some advice please.

I will be putting 5x4tb hard drives in my server at some point, but for now I'm making do with a mix of different things. I'm migrating from running a straight linux os with various services such as sonarr to proxmox.

I have proxmox installed on a 120gb ssd and then I have:

240gb SSD
1TB HDD
1TB HDD
120GB USB
120GB USB
4TB External HDD
My intention is to run my VMS etc from the SSD and then the HDDs as the data space. But I'm not sure how I am supposed to set this up. I haven't created any containers or vms yet as I don't want to get it wrong....i previously used mergerfs to make it easier in terms of downloading/storing and plex however I'm just not so sure with proxmox and it's layers how I should set this up so I don't have to do anything in the future other than add to it.

TIA

 

[Dominic]

Virtual Machines form a completely independent operating system. This means you can create, for example, a LVM thin storage on your 240GB SSD (this works in the Proxmox VE GUI, btw) and place the virtual hard disks of your VMs on it. Consider this Wiki article for an overview of storage types in Proxmox VE: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage

You then install an operating system of your choice in the VM or rather on the virtual disk of the VM. For that, you can choose a different file system.

Containers would be an alternative to VMs. They are generally lighter on resources, but do not provide as much isolation as VMs. Not sure how that would work for you, as I don't know what mergerfs does.

Anyway, if you have the 120GB for Proxmox VE, then just trying around with the other disks will not lead to problems. As long as you haven't moved anything important to those disks, you can create whatever storage you want on them and just wipe the disks after trying.

 

[ilovetoad]

Thanks Dominic, mergerfs basically presents all drives as one mount point. It doesn't do anything in terms of raid and parity, but it does save files across drives. So for instance I can mount all the drives to the fstab file so that I can download and not worry about running out of space on a specific drive, but the read time is definitely slow when it comes to plex.

I'm only likely to have a couple of VMs at this point so I'll have a read of the wiki again and see what I have missed!