Local Disks Question

[Foster Banks]

Hi All,

I have read about 6 threads and many different posts along with a lot of other documentation and i have not been able to find what I am looking for.

My scenario:
4 servers running ProxmoxVE 5.0 (hypervisors)
1 Server with 20+TB of ISO and NAS Backup.
All the servers have the following configuration:

2xCPU
64GB of RAM
1x120GB SSD (Where the OS is installed)
3x3TB SAS HDD.

Now, what I would like is to be able to use my local hard drives as shown here hxxp://nimb.ws/TdE69f to host VM's.
I have read articles talking about extending the local storage by increasing the size of the LVM partitions and so forth. Is there a clear way to get this done?

Thanks

Foster

 

[fireon]

Hello @Foster Banks and welcome to Proxmox!

First please use two SSD's for your OS, here you have an SPOF. To the second, yes you use your harddrives for storage. But how you would like to configure? It looks like you have no hardware raidcontroller. So what can you do?

• you can build in some HW raidcontroller
• you can use the each disk es one storage, like ext4
• you can use easy ZFS as raid, but here you should have one Enterprise CacheSSD per Host, and 10 GB Memory only for the filesystem.
  
• you can use softwareraid, this is in your case with only 3 HDD's faster then ZFS, and you don't need a lot resources for, but softwareraid mdadm ist not supported from proxmox

 

[Foster Banks]

Hi @fireon,

Thanks for the reply.
While waiting on a reply, i did some more research and I came across an OLD article written on 2013, which solved my question.

Basically i wanted to add each HDD as a StandAlone HDD "JBOD" and this did the trick.
hxxp://proxmoxve.blogspot.com.co/2013/12/how-to-add-extra-storage-in-proxmox-ve.html

At the moment i dont have 4 Hardware Raid Controllers, and I dont trust the Software Raid, I think its more manageable like this.
I have a 4-server cluster right now and I'm looking forward to try stuff out.

Question BTW, what "benefits/perks" should i expect if i setup ceph on these nodes?

Best Regards,

Foster

 

[Foster Banks]

*****UPDATE*****

Just in case someone else out there is wondering the same thing, maybe the link dies: 3 commands are needed.

cfdisk /dev/sdB This command is used to delete any old partitions currently on /dev/sdb. A single partition is needed.
pvcreate /dev/sdB1 This creates a "Physical Volume" for the Partition /dev/sdb
vgcreate <CLOUD_1> /dev/sdB1 This creates a Volume Group for the above mentioned partition.

After this, the HDD must be added to the Node via the Proxmox Cli: Server View --> Data Center --> Storage --> Add --> LVM. It will be listed there.
NOTE: For me, i had to add each different node via the HTTPS GUI to add the HDD to each specific Node. For some reason, cant be added from the Cluster Master Node, maybe i got something wrong.

Foster