First homelab server

[merox]

Hello all,

These days I will recieve my hardware to make my homeserver, I working in IT in last 4years as sysadmin on linux and networking, but I didn t worked with proxmox until now, so I need your tips and tricks to start with proxmox and maybe some ideas for how to design my proxmox vms on storage side.


I want to run nextcloud, zabbix, media server, home automation, mail server(maybe via cloudron to be done faster ), eveng for networking labs, pfsense, those are the service what I want to configure for the moment.

Hardware details:

DELL Precision

T7910 Workstation



CPU 1 : Intel OCTA

Core Xeon E5-2667

v3 3.20 GHz, 20MB

Cache



CPU 2 : Intel OCTA

Core Xeon E5-2667

v3 3.20 GHz, 20MB

Cache



Memorie RAM :

64GB (8 × 8GB)

DDR4 ECC Reg





Hard Disk #1 : 2TB

- SSD Samsung 870

EVO



Hard Disk #2 : 2TB

- SSD Samsung 870

EVO



Hard Disk #3 : 2TB

- HDD SATA

7200rpm



Hard Disk #4: 2TB

- HDD SATA

7200rpm



Gpu : nVidia

Quadro K2000 -

2GB GDDR5/128bit


Thank you !

 

[t.lamprecht]

Hi,

maybe some ideas for how to design my proxmox vms on storage side.

With that setup I'd go for a ZFS RAID 10. That gives you some redundancy, ~ 4 TB of usable space and also shouldn't hurt on performance. I'd recommend reading (or at least skimming) through the Proxmox VE ZFS related docs to get a better picture and avoid some possible caveats/pitfalls:

https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html#chapter_zfs

One of the most common things users new to ZFS are getting surprised off is the ARC, as by default, it'll reserve half of the memory as upper bound for cache use, which you may want to fine-tune:

https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html#sysadmin_zfs_limit_memory_usage

An option to make things a bit more sound could be using a small SSD for the root system and keeping the ZFS for virtual guest data only. That decouples the system a bit, can help if a disk in the ZFS system fails as the system wouldn't be affected at all by that, and vice versa if the SSD goes completely down one could reinstall PVE on a new one and import the ZFS pool there again.
The additional performance for the base system won't hurt either - also one could add part of that SSD as caching device to ZFS (albeit that'd defeat the decoupling again). But, I'm just throwing that out as idea here, if you got the time and joy on tinkering it'd just try around a bit, especially initially when that system isn't yet a more important part of your home setup.

 

[Dunuin]

With that setup I'd go for a ZFS RAID 10. That gives you some redundancy, ~ 4 TB of usable space and also shouldn't hurt on performance.

Two of the disks are consumer SSDs, two are HDDs. Two single mirrors would make more sense in my opinion.
Boot/system, backups and cold storage on the HDD mirror and VMs/LXCs on the SSD mirror.

 

[t.lamprecht]

Two of the disks are consumer SSDs, two are HDDs. Two single mirrors would make more sense in my opinion.
Boot/system, backups and cold storage on the HDD mirror and VMs/LXCs on the SSD mirror.

Argh, I only read the first two more closely and as all four are 2 TB I assumed those are all spinners, thanks for pointing out!
And yes, in that case a RAID10 wouldn't be a good idea, two separate mirrors would be definitively better suited.

 

[merox]

Argh, I only read the first two more closely and as all four are 2 TB I assumed those are all spinners, thanks for pointing out!
And yes, in that case a RAID10 wouldn't be a good idea, two separate mirrors would be definitively better suited.

No worries, so, when I will install proxmox I will setup raid1 for the ssds and raid1 for hdds, I’m right ? Thank you guys for your support

 

[Dunuin]

You should also check if the HDDs are using CMR or SMR. SMR would be bad if you want to create a ZFS mirror with them.

 

[Dunuin]

No worries, so, when I will install proxmox I will setup raid1 for the ssds and raid1 for hdds, I’m right ? Thank you guys for your support

With the installer you just install PVE to a single mirror. The other mirror can be created later using the WebUI.
So you first should decide how you want to use them and only then install PVE to the right mirror.

 

[merox]

With the installer you just install PVE to a single mirror. The other mirror can be created later using the WebUI.
So you first should decide how you want to use them and only then install PVE to the right mirror.

Thank you for the info, I will check tomorrow when I will recieve the server. (Smartctl is a good tool to check if the hdd is smr or cmr?)

From your point of view how is the best to manage the storage ? Install pve on ssd and mirror them for the beggining of installation, and to have the hdds for backups/cold storage, or?

 

[Dunuin]

Thank you for the info, I will check tomorrow when I will recieve the server. (Smartctl is a good tool to check if the hdd is smr or cmr?)

Look for the exact model number (for example using smartctl) and search online if that model is using SMR or CMR.

From your point of view how is the best to manage the storage ? Install pve on ssd and mirror them for the beggining of installation, and to have the hdds for backups/cold storage, or?

PVE doesn't need any performance. So you could use either SSDs or HDDs as boot/system disk. It would be even better if you got two small (32GB will be fine) SSDs for a dedicated boot/system mirror. This will have some benefits...for example you could easily delete and recreate your VM/LXC pool and backup/cold storage pool without needing to reinstall PVE. And neigther a big backup or heavy duty VM could slow down your system disks so PVE is always able to hypervise. And if you care about host backups it is best to do a blocklevel backup of the complete system disks so its way cheaper to backup 2x 32GB instead of 2x 2TB.