First Time Proxmox'r

[CopeyJ]

Hi,



Bit of a long one...



I picked up a Dell R530, from eBay, with the intention of giving it to my sons to experiment and run game servers etc. However, we’ve since looked into Proxmox, Xpenology, Nginx, Cloudflare, containers, Portainer... etc etc (you get the idea!)



We've had a quick mess about and currently have Proxmox running with Roon Core (Rock) and Xpenology VM's plus Portainer running Nginx.

Everything works great but I can’t help think we could do it better. The current system uses one of the SAS HDD as the Proxmox location and the other three are in Raid 5 via the Perc 730 controller in the server.



After a bit of reading, and youtube browsing, we have decided to redo whole thing in the following way:

Swap the slim DVD for an SSD caddy

Install Proxmox on the SSD (Only sata II speed but I’m ok with that)

Pass all backplane HDD through using HBA mode on the Perc 730

Use Proxmox to build a ZFS array (RaidZ/5?) using the, now, four 1.2tb, 12G SAS drives that came with the server.

Install Xpenology VM and let it make its own internal SHR array using three 3tb drives (Seagate Reds)

Reinstall the Roon Core VM

Reinstall Portainer and Nginx

Install Game servers (Youtuber,Techno Tim had an interesting video about Pterodactyl?)

Install pfsense and use Two of the four LAN ports for WAN/LAN (leave us with two LAN ports for Proxmox/VMs & idrac (Unless I should get the separate card and licence?)



Does this make sense, to you folks with more experience than me, or am I missing something??

(The server also came with the dual SD card module, but I've read that is only suitable for ESXi installs?)





Thanks for reading this far and for any help offered.



J

 

[Dunuin]

Does this make sense, to you folks with more experience than me, or am I missing something??

I would either passthrough the unformated disks into a NAS VM and create the raid inside the guest or I would create a ZFS pool on the PVE host and skip the NAS VM and setup SMB/NFS servers directly on the PVe server.

If you create a ZFS pool on the PVE host and then just work with virtual disks for your NAS VM, you will get additional overhead.

(The server also came with the dual SD card module, but I've read that is only suitable for ESXi installs?)

Jup, that is nothing you should install PVE on.

 

[CopeyJ]

I would either passthrough the unformated disks into a NAS VM and create the raid inside the guest or I would create a ZFS pool on the PVE host and skip the NAS VM and setup SMB/NFS servers directly on the PVe server.

If you create a ZFS pool on the PVE host and then just work with virtual disks for your NAS VM, you will get additional overhead.

Jup, that is nlthing you should install PVE on.

Thank you for the advice.