Homeserver questions Proxmox ZFS SSD Drives etc

[SuperMiguel]

Good afternoon, at home i have a small NAS (hardware, with old drives) and few raspberry pis running my home automation (home assistant) I just bought a dell t30 (xeon) to replace all of the pi's since they are getting a bit slow and cant handle the load, and also to replace my NAS, im thinking about running a proxmox environment.

So the idea is for home automation to be always up, and in case of failure i can bring it backup as fast as possible, also i want the ability to make snapshots so i can test new software and if fail i can easily roll back, the T30 doesn't have a hardware raid, and im not really willing to spend/waste money on it, so my 1st idea was to use ZFS but have a few questions about the disk configuration (i want to buy new disks for the server)

I want my home automation to be as fast as possible but keeping it secure so i definitely want to load the VM on a SSD. So what do you guys recommend as far as drives go?

I dont want to spend much money right now.. Probably want to start with 3 SSD, and use raidz1, is it recommended to install proxmox on the same drives as your vms/data go? or is it recommended to install on a separate drive?

Another possibility is to get a few mechanical drives, and 1 SSD for cache? would this be a better approach??

 

[Alwin]

This comes down to your workload. IO intensive VMs are better placed on SSD storage (lower latency/bandwidth then HDDs). ZFS on its own, benefits always on more RAM and then on the SSD for its ZIL/L2ARC. If your hardware failure recovery can include restore from backup, then I would suggest to do 1 SSD for your VMs OS disks and restore from backup if that SSD fails and use big HDDs in a RAID for your NAS & backups. Put Proxmox either on the same big HDDs or separate RAID1 disks if you like. If that setup doesn't fulfill your expectations then you always can switch and use the SSD for zfs caching and test your second approach.

 

[SuperMiguel]

After a bit of research i think i want to go with something like this:

1. Regular SSD
   1. Disk: 1x SSD
   2. Content: Proxmox install, VMs
2. ZFS RAIDZ-1
   1. Disk: 3x HDDs
   2. Zpool: storage_main
   3. Content: Data storage
   4. Content: VMs Backup

I this type of setup, should i get another SSD for cache?

 

[Alwin]

It greatly depends on how IO intense your VMs/services are. You need to test and see how you server will perform, zfs has some statistic tools for analysis.