Looking New Homelab recommendations

[zaraki1311]

Hello,

I am currently looking to migrating my homelab from ESXI to Proxmox and am looking for some advice on best practices and configuration before I go down the road of switching.

My Current Hardware is:
Ryzen 2700x
64gb ram
a few pcie nic cards 5 ports total
2x 2tb seagate hdd
3x 500gb samsung evo nvme

VMs that I am running:
Windows Server 2016 for PLEX
Windows Server 2016 for some basic applications and a SQL server
Windows Server 2016 Domain Controller
Ubuntu 18.06 running as a Docker host
FreeNAS (not actually using it as a NAS just playing with it as a VM)

In the near future I will probably end up replacing the additional NICs with a SFP+ card to my actual NAS and to my switch. I also might look at doing a GPU passthrough to on the the VMs. As another note, I might end up scrapping one of the windows server with SQL as most of the applications can be found in docker containers and I will probably move to MySQL instead of SQL Server.

Right now I have a second machine setup, with a 4770 and 4x 2tb drive. This is mostly to play around and leave before migrating the main host over.

From my understanding it seems like the recommendation is that Proxmox should be install on good old fashioned spinning rust in mirrored config, then have have the nvme as a raidz1 and the other spinning rust in raidz1. I do have nightly backups of all my machines to my NAS.

Am I correct in my storage config or is there something else I should be doing? Are there any other recommendations as I am fairly new to Proxmox, but do have some time to play on the test setup before going all in. TYI

 

[Dunuin]

Make sure to increase the volblocksize of the raidz1 pools if you don't want to waste space. Also keep in mind that consumer SSDs like your EVOs without powerloss protection will get a high write amplification (factor 20 here). Especially if you are using sync writes like MySQL does. My Raidz1 pool is writing 600GB per day and it is also just a homelab ideling most of the time. I also got two 500GB 970 EVOs but I'm not using them anymore and replaced them with enterprise grade SSDs so they will last longer then a year. And raidz isn't the fastest option. If you really want the NVMe speed it might be better to use a mirror or mirrored stripe so you don't get that parity calculation overhead.

 

[Dominic]

I recommend reading our migration guide and Windows best practices.

but do have some time to play on the test setup before going all in

In this case, I'd say just grab the PVE iso and install it on your test server. Having a second server gives you some options, you could, for example

1. Install Proxmox VE on test server
2. Migrate all VMs to test server
3. Test if everything works as expected
4. Replace ESXi on main server with Proxmox VE
5. Backup & restore from test to main server