File vs. Block Storage

[mstarks01]

Hello, everyone. New user here.

First, I'd like to acknowledge and thank everyone who has developed and contributed to Proxmox. It appears to be a highly polished product and I'm eager to get started.

I went through the default install and saw that a few partitions were created. The data partition was created as a block storage device and this is relatively new to me. Imagine my confusion when I dropped to a shell and couldn't find my data!

Considering that I prefer to have my server disk encrypted with full-disk encryption and I have only 16GB of RAM, would a more traditional file system be a better option? ZFS appears to require a fair amount of RAM. I have seen some posts about people installing Debian, then installing Proxmox in order to get the FDE.

My questions are:
1. Can I still achieve thin provisioning at the FS level without using block storage? Does it require qcow?
2. What am I effectively giving up by not going the block storage route besides over-provisioning?
3. if I choose to install Debian and then Proxmox, how is that different than a native CD installer? I think I read somewhere that Proxmox uses an Ubuntu kernel. Anything else?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Uncelvel]

Hi bro
1. u can use NFS, CephFS for FS
2. for u company budget, about maximum using 70% for u capacity storage in real other cluster storage. that means u can over-provisioning 140% then keep them safe
3. Yah, Debian u can call foreign-child of Ubuntu, u can customize partition disk, install some package blabla when u install Proxmox from OS

 

[mstarks01]

Hi bro
1. u can use NFS, CephFS for FS
2. for u company budget, about maximum using 70% for u capacity storage in real other cluster storage. that means u can over-provisioning 140% then keep them safe
3. Yah, Debian u can call foreign-child of Ubuntu, u can customize partition disk, install some package blabla when u install Proxmox from OS

Thanks for your response. I'll look into CephFS as an option.

This is for my personal use, so company budget is my budget. I don't really need over-provisioning, but I do want to make use of thin provisioning.

I'm OK with using Debian and installing PVE on top, but I'd like to understand the trade-offs. In other words, how much is customized in the PVE installer? What packages are included vs. a clean Debian install? What about the kernel? What else might be tweaked?

 

[mstarks01]

Is anyone able to comment on the differences between installing Proxmox on Debian and using the Debian installer?

 

[aaron]

The PVE installer will partition the disk in a specific way. For a root FS that is not ZFS it will create an LVM with a root LV and a thin provisioned LV for guest disks.
If you install it in UEFI mode with ZFS it will set up systemd-boot instead of GRUB.

I think these are the basic things that will be different if you use the installer vs installing it on top of debian.

 

[mstarks01]

Thanks, Aaron. I ran across this just yesterday. Does it about sum things up? It seems like the file system, sources and kernel may be the only real differences.