Installing Proxmox VE 2 on a SSD drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter sjb79
  • Start date Start date
S

sjb79

Guest
Hi Guys!
This is my first post so please be gentle :-)
I've been going through this forum looking at entries for SSD drives and Proxmox - there's quite a few!
I haven't quite found a thread regarding what I am looking to do so I thought start my own.
I'm planning on putting together my own private cloud for me and some friends. It will start small and grow as I add to it.
I'm looking to install Proxmox on 1 server (initally) and have a seperate SAN to handle the virtual machines' harddisks.
To keep electricity usage as low as possible I was planning on having just one SSD drive in the server to install Proxmox itself - with the SAN handling everything VM storage related.

Has anyone else tried this? Is this a recommended setup? Does the Kernel in version 2 support TRIM?
 
what advantage would having an SSD in the server be if everything is running on the SAN? (apart from the server booting a bit quicker?)
 
would be interesting to look at some comparisons for speed... there is a lot of chat about comparisons between SCSI, SATA, SAS, and SSD. SSD defo is fast but is it stable for long term? I've read on a few places that they have a finite write limit or is that the old SSDs? Im my PE1950s its cheaper to put in more ram ;) especially since RAM is now far cheaper than SSDs :D
 
I was thinking of a setup like an ESXi server. But you're suggesting instead of having local storage in that server or node that I could just boot it off the SAN?
 
I was thinking that you'd have a local disk for PVE on the server, but store the VM images on a SAN.

If you run PVE and images off the same machine i guess the SSD would be an improvement BUT i'd recommend having 2 SSDs in a mirrored raid array.
 
sjb79 said:
I'm planning on putting together my own private cloud for me and some friends. It will start small and grow as I add to it.
I'm looking to install Proxmox on 1 server (initally) and have a seperate SAN to handle the virtual machines' harddisks.
To keep electricity usage as low as possible I was planning on having just one SSD drive in the server to install Proxmox itself - with the SAN handling everything VM storage related.
Click to expand...

You could always build a PVE box with 2 SSDs and dump the SAN idea until your usage requirements excede the local storage requirements? It would be cheaper in terms of energy usage for 1 PVE2 box dual SSDs with a USB HDD for backups than 1 PVE 2 box with 1 SDD and a SAN unit.
 
That's an interesting idea with the having everything in a single server to keep electricity costs down. I didn't think of that :) . I've read a few of the other SSD entries in this forum and some people have not been sure if the Kernel being used by Proxmox supports TRIM etc. Does version 2 support TRIM?
 
No idea, i've not looked into it... might be worth doing a test install and if it doesn't stick the SSD into your main PC ;)
 
True. Though I've just looked up the Kernel that is going to be used in Proxmox 2 (from http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap#Roadmap_for_2.x) which is apparently going to be 2.6.32. This does not fully support TRIM but apparently you can include a backport for this kernel. On Debian the commands used would be;


"deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main contrib non-free"

and after an update command aptitude install -t squeeze-backports linux-image-2.6-amd64. Now if I was to do this would it break proxmox?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Never install a third party kernel, use always the latest Proxmox kernel.
 
sjb79 said:
That's an interesting idea with the having everything in a single server to keep electricity costs down. I didn't think of that :) . I've read a few of the other SSD entries in this forum and some people have not been sure if the Kernel being used by Proxmox supports TRIM etc. Does version 2 support TRIM?
Click to expand...
Hi,
yes - i've one pve2-system with 2 SSDs as spool disks for backup. This disks are mounted with the ext4-option discard which do TRIM.
pve-installation on ssd should be no problem i guess (but normaly is ext3 used, which can't use TRIM). But the big effort is only the power saving in this case. And yes - SSDs are not very realible, as spooldisk two ocz vertex are died after a short time (ok, ok - with a lot of writes...). For heavy writing disks you should not use MLC-SSDs.

Udo
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom