Internal Boot Drive

[ckameron99]

Hi all, I'm attempting to set up a home lab consisting of Dell poweredge servers, a R610, R710 and R720 specifically. I'd like to install proxmox to internal storage, and have the drives on the backplane be dedicated to VM containers etc, so that if I need to reinstall proxmox it will not affect the VMs. All three servers have an internal USB intended for this purpose, but due to the high amount of writes proxmox performs on the boot drive I think this could tank longevity. My questions are:

• Is there a way to disable or redirect these writes to a network share?
• Would using a usb to sata converter and using a HDD or SSD be a better idea, and if so: which?
• Is the ideal solution something I haven't considered?

Thank you so much for any help you can give.

 

[aaron]

As you experienced, using SD cards or USB flash drives will not work well with PVE, and they will die sooner or later.

If you have the space in the server, add some SSDs or HDDs for the boot drives (having them mirrored is always a good idea). There might be some SATA ports directly available on the motherboard if you don't have any space left in the drive bays.

You could try to use the USB ports with some HDD or SSD. That is still better than a USB flash drive. But keep in mind that consumer SSDs also have a limited write life span compared to datacenter SSDs.

 

[ckameron99]

Great! Thanks for your help. I think I can disconnect the optical drive and use that SATA connector, I've ordered the required cabling so will try that and post an update if I remember. I'll have a go mirroring too, although I'm completely new to this home lab stuff so I might end up without it.

 

[aaron]

If you use the PVE installer and select ZFS as file system, you can select to install it in a RAID1 (mirror) and choose the 2 disks which should be used in the mirror. (you'll have to unselect all other disks). So that should be fairly easy to set up

 

[MarcMorgan]

Great! Thanks for your help. I think I can disconnect the optical drive and use that SATA connector, I've ordered the required cabling so will try that and post an update if I remember. I'll have a go mirroring too, although I'm completely new to this home lab stuff so I might end up without it.

I also have a Dell R710 - with the optical drive, looking to get SSD for my OS - what cable did you order, did you manage to get 2 setup for a raid?