Installation of Proxmox and Replication on HP DL380 Gen9 Server

mikaelgoltz

New Member
Dec 5, 2024
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Hello everyone, first of all,

I'm new to the Proxmox world and, in a way, I have very basic knowledge of Linux virtualization. I’d like to seek advice from more experienced users if possible.

I have 2x HP DL380 Gen9 servers with the following specifications in terms of memory and storage:

  • 256GB of RAM on each server
  • 2x 1TB Samsung 860 EVO SATA SSDs on each server
  • 2x 4TB Samsung 890 PRO NVMe SSDs on each server
I decided to use Proxmox in a production environment because I want to learn more about KVM, due to cost considerations, and because of the backup support currently offered by Veeam. Unfortunately, I’ve encountered some issues, and despite a lot of research, I haven’t found much information related to my situation.

I installed PVE version 8.2 on one server, using ZFS RAID with an ARC cache set to a max size of 64GB. However, I found the performance to be worse than what I’m used to with software RAID setups on Windows Server hosts, for instance. Because of this, I read about installing Proxmox on top of Debian and considered using mdadm for disk management instead.

Here’s the question: If anyone with experience could help, would this be an improper approach? Is it likely that I wouldn’t gain any performance benefits from this setup? Are there users who run Proxmox with mdadm RAID, or should I stick to ZFS and not worry about disk wear or other concerns I’ve read about?

Would I face issues replicating VMs to my second host if I used this kind of setup with LVM RAID?

Another thing I noticed while using Veeam for backups is that it only allows me to migrate VMs from a Windows host to Proxmox using the RAW format. This results in a disk that was set to 700GB but only uses 300GB of storage taking up the full 700GB after migration. Is this a peculiarity of the RAW format, or would this happen regardless of the disk format?

If I’ve said anything incorrect, I apologize. English is not my primary language, and I’m just looking for advice on these questions.

Thank you!
 
Because of this, I read about installing Proxmox on top of Debian and considered using mdadm for disk management instead.

Here’s the question: If anyone with experience could help, would this be an improper approach?

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Software_RAID#Unsupported_Technologies

Would I face issues replicating VMs to my second host if I used this kind of setup with LVM RAID?

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage_Replication#_supported_storage_types