How should I set up storage for my HP DL380 Gen9 on PVE?

[mildred]

Hi everyone, I recently picked up a used HP DL380 Gen9 with 8x 2TB SAS HDDs and a 1TB consumer NVMe SSD. I'm a total PVE newbie, and the storage layout is giving me a huge headache. Right now, after the default install, the SSD is an LVM (1TB), and the HDDs are in a RAID50, which created a massive 8TB local-lvm. But the "local" partition—the only place I can put ISOs and backups—is only 100GB.

My issue is that the local-lvm is huge but useless for backups and ISOs, and the "local" folder is way too small. My plan was to use the SSD for the OS and fast VMs, and the HDDs for slow VMs and backups. Should I re-do my RAID as RAID1 + RAID10? Or should I try to shrink the local-lvm? Also, an AI suggested creating a "Backup VM" inside local-lvm and mounting it back—is that actually a thing people do in the real world?

The biggest worry is that I don't have a UPS, and this consumer SSD doesn't have power-loss protection. If the SSD dies, is there a way to have a backup OS on the HDDs ready to boot up so I can save my data?

 

[pulipulichen]

Hi,

Nothing is wrong — this is just the default Proxmox LVM layout.

When you install PVE with the default ext4 (LVM) layout, the installer splits the selected system disk into:

• local (directory storage, ~100GB by default)
• local-lvm (LVM-thin for VM disks, gets the rest)

local is only meant for ISOs, templates and backups.
local-lvm is block storage and can only hold VM disks — not files.

So the reason you only have ~100GB for ISOs/backups is simply because that’s the installer default.

The important question is:

Which disk did you select during install — the NVMe or the RAID50 volume?

Whichever disk you installed PVE onto is the one that got split into 100GB local + large local-lvm.

Let’s confirm that first before touching RAID or resizing anything.

 

[pulipulichen]

Also, personally I would not recommend installing PVE on a consumer NVMe SSD in a server like this.

PVE is a 24/7 system that constantly writes logs, RRD stats, cluster state, etc. Consumer SSDs (especially without power‑loss protection) can wear out much faster than expected, and an unexpected power cut without a UPS increases the risk of filesystem corruption.

If this machine has 8 SAS drives and a proper RAID controller, I would generally prefer:

• PVE OS on a small RAID1 (HDD or enterprise SSD)
• NVMe used for fast VM disks only

It’s not that it won’t work — many people run it that way — but from a reliability perspective, it’s not ideal.