Installing to internal USB drive

[bthunderw]

I'm considering moving from vSphere to ProxMox and I've been running ProxMox for a while in test environment with success. Most of my prod servers are machines with no local storage as they boot from a USB Stick that's inside the server. All the datastores are either NFS or iSCSI.

How feasible is it to run ProxMox from USB storage in long term? I'm talking simply booting the node, all VM data would be stored on NFS. How much disk IO ProxMox performs during regular operation on the boot/tmp drive? Ideally I'd like to see all boot IO operations stop after the machine is fully booted. Other than config changes of course.

Tom

 

[tom]

I would not recommend USB stick, these are not reliable and I saw a lot with defects the last years. I recommend a small but reliable SSD instead, e.g Intel SSD.

 

[bthunderw]

Bummer. I was hoping that wouldn't be the case. Do you know if there are any plans to provide this kind of functionality? It would make deploying lots of nodes very quick and easy.

Tom

I would not recommend USB stick, these are not reliable and I saw a lot with defects the last years. I recommend a small but reliable SSD instead, e.g Intel SSD.

 

[tom]

don´t understand your answer. we do not produce USB keys, we do just software. but if you do not want to follow my recommendation, just install it on unreliable USB key, its no problem for Proxmox VE, its your problem if the USB stick fails soon.

 

[bthunderw]

I mean the ability to install on a USB stick and keep writes to a minimum, use either RAM allocated storage for logging/swap or a data store.

don´t understand your answer. we do not produce USB keys, we do just software. but if you do not want to follow my recommendation, just install it on unreliable USB key, its no problem for Proxmox VE, its your problem if the USB stick fails soon.

 

[rpotter28]

I mean the ability to install on a USB stick and keep writes to a minimum, use either RAM allocated storage for logging/swap or a data store.

I think what Tom means is that running from USB storage is unsupported in Proxmox, and that USB keys are unreliable. BUT, Proxmox is Linux, based on Debian 6, and this can be done. Just don't come here looking for support when it breaks.

 

[tom]

yes. there is a lot possible but not all makes sense - at least for me.

 

[bsilva]

Hi,
check out my thread: http://forum.proxmox.com/threads/10414-Proxmox-boot-from-usb-pen-drive

But as others said, there may be issues with this setup in production (I use this as a test server).

For instance, managing a cluster on these...

But as a single server, it works fine.