Hardware suggestions for new Proxmox build

C

cdsJerry

Renowned Member
Sep 12, 2011
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I'm looking for suggestions. I need to build a new server. It will host a few VMs which will all be Windows servers, maybe as many as four of them. One will be Quickbooks Enterprise, one will be a web server (mostly hosting images as we use a hosted e-commerce solution but pull images from our local machine), and a couple of low-level Windows machines.

The QB enterprise is probably the most demanding load I'll have. Per their specs they require a min. of:
  • Windows Server 2012 (or R2), 2016, or 2019
  • 2.4 GHz processor
  • 4 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended)
  • 2.5 GB disk space recommended (additional space required for data files)
  • 4x DVD-ROM drive (unless user is downloading from Intuit server)
  • Payroll and online features require Internet access (1 Mbps recommended speed)
  • Product registration required
  • Optimized for 1280x1024 screen resolution or higher. Supports one Workstation Monitor, plus up to 2 extended monitors. Optimized for Default DPI settings.
The other VMs will also run Windows Server 2016 or 2019. I'm a bit lost on what hardware I'll need. I'm a bit anxious to get it started however as my current Proxmox stopped working over the weekend and needed a power cycle. I fear something may be getting ready to fail.

Question: Does anyone out there do consulting or build systems? Maybe I should go that route?

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sherminator said:
Hey,

is your plan to get one physical machine with local storage, or do you want to have some kind of fault tolerance, replication, HA, whatsoever?

Many greets
Stephan
Click to expand...
My plan is to have one machine with three or four Windows VMs on it. I won't have any replication or fault tolerance because of my tight budget. Instead I'll back up the VMs to NAS drives a couple of times a day and maybe a non-raid local drive on the Proxmox as well (because it's faster than my network).

Once I have the system up and stable I _could_ use the machine that's currently hosting my VMs and use it as a redundant system or something except that's beyond my technical ability.
 
Some of the hardware has been ordered and should be delivered early next week. I think I need to order one more HDD for an internal backup location for Proxmox to use so that mid-day backups aren't slowed by my network. I'm not set up for Jumbo frames anywhere.
What I have coming is:
Dell PowerEdge T320 8B LFF 5U
Xeon E5-2440 2.4GHz 6 core
95GB DDR3-1600 RDIMM (6x16GB)
PERCH H710 w/512MB and Batt PCIe
4x 4TB 7.2K SATA drives.

What I have in mind is 4 "drives" of 500GB for each of the 3 Windows Server builds plus 1 Windows 10 Pro machine (only used for shipping). Since I can change the RAM on each one after the fact I'm not too concerned with allocation there but my initial plan is 24GB on the three Servers, and 8GB on the Windows 10 Machine.
The three Windows Servers are :
1) Quickbooks Enterprise - reasonably heavy load
2) Email/Web/FTP server - The heavy part of the load is the email server (Imail Server). The rest is a light load as my eCommerce is hosted elsewhere so this is just the graphics etc. used by the web page and it's cached with Cloudflare to further lighten the load. We seldom use the FTP. I think it's biggest load is when my FreePBX does it's backup.
3)Existing Window 2008R2 VM which will only run our Contact Management program. SUPER light load but if I move it to a new server I pay new license fees.
4) Windows 10Pro for our shipping. Super light use to run Fedex and UPS shipping software.

As far as budget... our company sells blank CDs, DVDs, and duplicators. As you can guess, the demand for that isn't very much these days so things are tight. We also sell and duplicate SD cards, USB drives, and the duplication hardware related to that but it's a much smaller volume than the discs used to be. It's growing, but funds are tight. I'll spend what I need to spend. And I want to avoid doing this again real soon because my time is super limited as I'm pulled in six directions at once. I'll need to build the system after hours and I already work a 55-60 hour normal week. I need to to last a while.

Once it's up, I will convert my existing Proxmox unit to serve as a backup should there be a hardware failure. If there was an easy way to update it and just keep using it I'd take that route but I can't go without a working machine so I can't work the live machine, especially given my lack of knowledge. What you guys do without thinking requires research on my part to do.

My old machine is an 8 core Xeon CPU X3440 @ 2.5GHz, 1 socket with 24GB RAM. So you can see the new machine should be more powerful (I'm hoping the drop from 8 core to 6 core doesn't bite me but I didn't see any 8 core options as I was buying the new machine. It's currently running Proxmox 3.4-16/40.

Really the reason I'm forced to build a new system is because of the drop of Windows Server 2008R2. It's forcing me to build new VMs with the new Server versions and I thought that this would also be a good time to update to the current Proxmox version.
 
Didn't get to read everything you've written but saw QuickBooks enterprise and figured I'd offer some input. Since I've run that on esxi, hyperv, and proxmox in production.

The recommended way I've always seen to deploy it is using Windows terminal server/RDS. The QB company files a database manager run on the same machine as the QB client software (GUI). Everything installs together. You can separate them but then you need to make sure your networking is sufficient or you'll end up with issues. The reason they recommend this method instead of installing QB on end user PCs and then hosting the database manager on a server, is because QB doesn't deal with network latency well and even more so when you need to run it in multi-user mode. Remote access is also an issue if you try to install to end user PCs and give them access to the database over a VPN. You'll end up with a corrupt database often. The RDS method keeps the client software (ie. GUI) and database (company files) on the same storage (or at least in the same data center and network).

You have to purchase RDS CALs though, which sucks.

And I publish QuickBooks as a RemoteApp instead of making them login to a full desktop. Helps with resource usage.

Currently I run it on a Windows server 2016 KVM instance. 16GB of ram, with 2 sockets/4 cores. Regularly have 6-8 users, up to 10.
 
jayg30 said:
The recommended way I've always seen to deploy it is using Windows terminal server/RDS.

And I publish QuickBooks as a RemoteApp instead of making them login to a full desktop. Helps with resource usage.

Currently I run it on a Windows server 2016 KVM instance. 16GB of ram, with 2 sockets/4 cores. Regularly have 6-8 users, up to 10.
Click to expand...
Yes. That's what I'm currently doing as well with Windows Server 2008R2 and plan to do with the new one. You're right, it saves a lot of database corruption plus I can use much slower computers for the terminals that way. It does suck that I need to buy more licenses but it's the lessor of the evils. Thanks for confirming.
 
cdsJerry said:
Yes. That's what I'm currently doing as well with Windows Server 2008R2 and plan to do with the new one. You're right, it saves a lot of database corruption plus I can use much slower computers for the terminals that way. It does suck that I need to buy more licenses but it's the lessor of the evils. Thanks for confirming.
Click to expand...

Cool, wanted to make sure. Running a current version of QB on server 2016, published as a RemoteApp, I see approx 150-250MB / user session. Up to 500MB if they are long lived sessions and are doing something more extensive in the App. Surprising CPU usage is much lower then I expected with only occasional spikes, as long as you don't let windows update run crazy like it tries to sometimes.

The storage has been the most critical component for me. Bad storage will kill the responsiveness of the VM and make everything just not work well. I run a ZFS pool. Mirrored vdevs with an Intel DC S3710 SLOG device. The slog actually helps a lot in my experience. Optane is where it's at for SLOG devices now though. I'm a big fan on ZFS so you might want to run something different.

My host servers were built a few years ago through eBay deals. Intel barebone servers (24 bay 2U), dual E5-2670's, 128GB of RAM, 10GB SFP+ cards, LSI 3008 12GB/s HBAs running in IT mode, bunch of Hitachi SAS disks pulled from old NetApps, and the Intel slog. I built a bunch of them because they were so cheap at the time, ~ $800-$1000 per node. Each node runs a LOT more then what you have listed above.

If you have a corporate structure that allows you to buy used gear off eBay and seek out deals you can get some amazing stuff. I really liked the forums over at servethehome for finding and tracking some of the deals as they have a section dedicated to it. It's amazing some of the gear that sells on eBay and what you can build for so little money.
 
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I added a non-raid HDD to the system in addition to the RAID drives. I planned to use the non-raid for mid-day backups as it should be faster than network backups. I then installed Proxmox using the ISO and it seemed to work fine.

However... I'm not 100% sure, but I think everything installed on the non-RAID drive? When I go into the storage I have a "local (pve)" drive and a "local-IVM (pve)" drive. The local-IVM is the RAID drive based on the size in properties.

When I try to create a VM however I'm only offered the "local" drive, the non-raid one. That's not what I want at all. I want Proxmox as well as my VMs to be on the RAID drive. How do I do this?

I also tried doing an install from the ISO without the non-raid HDD in the system. It installs just fine but I can't figure out how to then add the drive and get Proxmox to use it for backups. Youtube videos seem to imply that it's really hard to add a HDD to Proxmox after the install.

So my questions are
1) How do I get Proxmox to install on the RAID drive?
2) How do I then get Proxmox to create VMs on the RAID drive?
3) Assuming I may need to remove the single HDD during installation, how would I then add the HDD to the system and use it with Proxmox?
 
Generally, the installer of Proxmox VE uses a whole disk and places both storages "local" and "local-lvm" onto this disk. During installation, you can select which disk the installer should use to install.

I suggest you remove your backup HDD from the system during the installation. Then PVE can only be installed on the RAID drives (1).
Is your RAID a hardware-raid?

If yes, then only one disk should appear in the installer.
If no, then you could create something like ZFS RAID Z 2 with those 4 disks in the installer.
In either case, the installer will then place all storages onto this RAID.

Consequently, all VMs will be created on the RAID (2).

After the installation, you can plug in your backup HDD again. Unfortunately, you will have to create a partition and a file system on this disk manually. After having done that, you can go to Datacenter->Storage and add your backup HDD as Directory Storage. Select "VZDump backup file" while doing this (3).

When I try to create a VM however I'm only offered the "local" drive, the non-raid one
Click to expand...
This is strange. local-lvm is supposed to hold disk images for your VMs as default. You can check this and specify which content types a storage should hold in Datacenter->storage.
 
OK, I've been playing with this some more, and I reinstalled it yet again. I did miss the screen where you can change the drive. But I don't think it mattered as the default is the RAID drive after all. Not sure why Proxmox showed it as 0% used and the non-RAID as .6% used but whatever. It is installing on the correct drive so I'll start over again. It's all keyboard work during the install. There's a mouse somewhere, but it's not visible. Unless you click around and just get lucky, you can't use it. I mean, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. The trouble it it also find the wrong nut about as often so using the keyboard is the only reasonable way around. It's particularly hard when you're trying to select the country drop-down menu. Once you get it you can arrow around and tab to the other drop-downs but that first one gives the squirrel a work out.

Side note: I found THE most helpful guide yet for installing Windows Server 2019. I've spent many hours in the forum and other pages trying to find a somewhat easy to understand guide for installing Windows correctly. So thankful I found his page. https://davejansen.com/recommended-settings-windows-10-2016-2018-2019-vm-proxmox/
 
Last edited:
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Great that some of your problems are resolved! There is a bug report for invisible mouse pointers on our Bugzilla.

We have an article about installing Windows on our Wiki and there is also a video tutorial on our website.
 
Dominic said:
We have an article about installing Windows on our Wiki and there is also a video tutorial on our website.
Click to expand...

Only 37 seconds into the video and it's already not matching up. The options in the video do not match the options in version 6.1-3. As an expert you say 'well it's close enough I can figure out what it should be" but as a newbie I go "this doesn't match my screen already so the rest of the video probably won't match either".
 
Thank you for bringing this to our attention! I've passed your feedback on to the relevant team members. Unfortunately, it might take some time until a new video is released. Please let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help you with your new setup!
 
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