Install Proxmox to HDD vs SSD

[masteroc]

Getting ready to jump into Proxmox after messing around with it on a test bench. My main question is whether or not I will see a performance decrease by having Proxmox installed to a spare 500gb HDD I have lying around. The VM/container data will be kept on a 250gb SSD. I would rather not waste the room on the SSD with Proxmox unless it will affect the performance of the VM/Containers. I don't really care if the Proxmox UI is slow or intial startup is slow.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

 

[LiSergey]

I have setup of PVE like you described, but it was initally setup on HDD and after a year added SDD.
GUI and everything just works fine, and VMs are pleasantly much faster.

 

[masteroc]

I have setup of PVE like you described, but it was initally setup on HDD and after a year added SDD.
GUI and everything just works fine, and VMs are pleasantly much faster.

So the VMs were faster after moving the install to a SSD?

I plan to keep all the VMs on an SSD and just have the Proxmox system on an HDD. I just want to make sure that won't impact performance.

 

[LiSergey]

So the VMs were faster after moving the install to a SSD?

I plan to keep all the VMs on an SSD and just have the Proxmox system on an HDD. I just want to make sure that won't impact performance.

I didn't reinstalled, just added SSD in raid1 as /mnt/ssdata/ and moved VMs to there.

 

[LiSergey]

re-read you topic-start and wonder - what the purpose of migrating to HDD?
PVE eats only 3-4 GB, and for swap you better use fast SSD anyway.

for me the question is - will your server provide enough RAM for not use swap on HDD?

 

[masteroc]

Just want to save a SATA III port if possible and put Proxmox on a SATA II HDD. Server has 80gb of ram but your point about swap is valid.

Just to double check, I can run VMs off the disk where Proxmox is installed, right?

 

[LiSergey]

Just want to save a SATA III port if possible and put Proxmox on a SATA II HDD. Server has 80gb of ram but your point about swap is valid.

Yes, it is pretty possible to put Proxmox on HDD and VMs on another (physical) storage.
With PVE4.x you could define the location and size of partitions where to setup Proxmox during the setup.

Just to double check, I can run VMs off the disk where Proxmox is installed, right?

Right. After setup on HDD, in GUI, add storage for your VMs on different LVM/directory.
If directory, than you'd have to mount it beforehand manually.

Back to reasons.
Proxmox takes only 3-4 GB for the system, and with your 80GB RAM I would use only 4GB for swap (my servers hadn't used more then 1Gb of swap for long time. When it happened once, the server was obviously overloaded and gave slow performance, so I moved a hungry VM to another PVE host. Maybe there are reasons to keep swap big, I don't see them yet)
Total 8 GB. Is it really necessary to skimp that on SSD on SATAIII?
But if you plan to play aroud SATA-III drive, than it is good to settle system on HDD which would be the ground.