Is it safe to raid the proxmox installation?

[juansantana]

Hi guys.
I would like a clarification, if it is feasible and safe to install proxmox in software raid using debian, you know?
I saw this tutorial https://www.forumitbr.com.br/viewtopic.php?t=2157
And I was in doubt if it is completely safe and functional?
Do you recommend?
I would like to make a redundancy on the disks where the proxmox will be installed.
Sorry for my English.
I am very grateful.

 

[ness1602]

IT is safe as in "it will work", but i usually recommend either hardware raid, or zfs software raid.

 

[Dunuin]

Jep, working fine here over a year (debian installer with mdadm software raid) but keep in mind that such a setup isn't officially supported.

 

[juansantana]

IT is safe as in "it will work", but i usually recommend either hardware raid, or zfs software raid.

I understand, is that my hardware does not support raid.
Is it possible to do ZFS RAID on debian installation?

 

[juansantana]

Jep, working fine here over a year (debian installer with mdadm software raid) but keep in mind that such a setup isn't officially supported.

So I'm deciding whether or not to use it, I'm afraid of having future problems when the server is running applications.

 

[Dunuin]

Is it possible to do ZFS RAID on debian installation?

No.

 

[Thalix]

I would like a clarification, if it is feasible and safe to install proxmox in software raid using debian, you know?

We have been using lvmthin + ext4 + software RAID10 on over 650 servers with Enterprise SSD for over a year. Without any problems. The systems are highly performant and rock stable. Previously, RAIDZ-1 was used on the entire server farm, but we were never completely satisfied with the performance of ZFS for our application area. We use ZEN2 and ZEN3 Epycs with ECC RAM on all servers.

 

[juansantana]

We have been using lvmthin + ext4 + software RAID10 on over 650 servers with Enterprise SSD for over a year. Without any problems. The systems are highly performant and rock stable. Previously, RAIDZ-1 was used on the entire server farm, but we were never completely satisfied with the performance of ZFS for our application area. We use ZEN2 and ZEN3 Epycs with ECC RAM on all servers.

Thank you very much. I'll apply here, and see if everything is ok.

 

[frox]

but we were never completely satisfied with the performance of ZFS for our application area. We use ZEN2 and ZEN3 Epycs with ECC RAM on all servers.

Do you possibly have some comparisons? I am planning to build an AMD EPYC server with a RaidZ1 raid for the VMs.

 

[Dunuin]

In general it's not recommended to use any kind of raidz as a VM storage because of the bad IOPS (which is what you primarily need and not througput) compared to striped mirrors. No matter how many disks your raidz will consist of, it will have less IOPS than a single disk.
And also keep in mind that a raidz1/2/3 forces you to use a bigger blocksize. With 4 or more disks in a raidz1 you are forced to increase the volblocksize to atleast 32K so you loose another 50 to 88% of your IOPS/throughput as soon as you do 4/8/16K reads/writes (like MySQL or Posgres DBs will do).

 

[ness1602]

I'm using hardware raid and Epyc server,and raid5 works great. But this has internal raid controller.

 

[frox]

In general it's not recommended to use any kind of raidz as a VM storage because of the bad IOPS (which is what you primarily need and not througput) compared to striped mirrors. No matter how many disks your raidz will consist of, it will have less IOPS than a single disk.
And also keep in mind that a raidz1/2/3 forces you to use a bigger blocksize. With 4 or more disks in a raidz1 you are forced to increase the volblocksize to atleast 32K so you loose another 50 to 88% of your IOPS/throughput as soon as you do 4/8/16K reads/writes (like MySQL or Posgres DBs will do).

So would you say a simple hardware raid with raid controller makes more sense? I would have the possibility to get an Adaptec controller cheap, but would need somehow a solution how to use the fast NVMe SSDs as VM storage.

 

[Dunuin]

You can use ZFS for that, just don't be thrifty and get some proper enterprise/datacenter grade NVMes and use a mirror (raid1) of 2 disks or a striped mirror (raid10) of 4 or 8 NVMes if you want ZFS with good performance. You also might not want to use all of the onboard M.2 slots, because sometimes they are connected to the chipset instead of directly to the CPU, so these M.2 slots could be bottlenecked by the link between the CPU and the chipset.