Migration from Debian to Proxmox on a NUC

[Kane]

Hello everyone,

Before trying to migrate (or convert) what I have to a Proxmox system, I wanted to check with you if that is something viable to do.

For the harware I have an Asrock Beebox J3455, that contain a... J3455 (quad core @1.5Ghz to 2.3Ghz), 8GB of RAM (the maximum possible), an internal eMMC disk of 32GB and a M.2 Slot + a SATA port both containing a 500GB SSD.

Currently my system is installed on the eMMC, both SSD are linked together in a mirrored ZFS pool, and the whole run Debian Buster on the main system and in it's LXC containers that are stored on the ZFS partition. And I have qemu-kvm in test to add eventually some VMs.
So yeah, it's mostly Proxmox without Proxmox himself.

At first I wanted to use Proxmox but since I wanted it installed on the eMMC I didn't succeeded to install it, so I made my own setup, but after some time I want to give it another go. After some research I discovered that I can bypass the eMMC limit by installing Debian first, but that Proxmox generate GB of logs per day that will quickly destroy it, and 32GB is small for this quantity of logs.

Since it is for a production environment I want to make something clean clean that will work instead of trying and finishing on something unstable. So before trying I wanted to ask you, is it possible to install and configure Proxmox in a way that will allow me to put it and the eMMC, move it's logs to some storage setup on the ZFS pool (with the VMs and containers) and run it correctly without issues? If yes have you any guide of indications for that?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[tim]

Whats the purpose of your machine? The 8GB RAM will definitely limit you.
Proxmox does not log GB per day, at least not if it's a default installation, currently my logs are around 60MB for a single node.

 

[Kane]

I can't deny that I am limited by the RAM for now, I plan to upgrade later for something better but it wont be before some month or even a year
I mostly self-host everything on it, so I plan to again have a little of everything running inside (LDAP, minio, MySQL, pgSQL, seafile, postfix/dovecot, some php and go applications, a cal/carddav server, anything that I may find interesting to host while I still have space and memory), with all the opened to the world applications connected to a VPS via Wireguard to provide the service from an external entry point that distribute them via HAProxy. I also have two identical Beebox so I can distribute the services between them if needed.

The idea, additionned to the "just for learning" part is to have everything easily able to migrate from one server to another if I need to, upgrade something or change for a better server. I also wanted to try working more with VMs and thin clients, but with what I have for now I wont go really far since I do not have enough memory for it.

I was referring to this post for the log size, that's why I had theses values in mind.

 

[tim]

Hmm I have to check with my colleague what he was referring to in his post, but I can only guess that he meant it as a write total. That's why he mentioned that we only recommend durable disks, because they will have to tolerate a lot of writes per day, but that amount won't be stored persistent.

 

[Kane]

I see, well, if it write everything in /var/log I can move it to the ZFS part to preserve it's life, or I guess that in the worst case I can temporarly set it in tmpfs if I need too.

But for you, except the part where the RAM size is a little low everything seem doable? If I am right I have maybe only 5 or 6 services that are used daily, if it is too much I can still just prepare and work with the rest of them for the future migration and just keep them off the rest of the time or when I do not work with them.

 

[tim]

I mean for sure it's doable, but the right question is, if it's usable. Just try it, you'll see if you can live with it and if there is no other option, why not.

I wouldn't think to long about the logging thing, I would estimate a 100MB a day total write for your use case and we talk about months regarding the lifetime of your eMMC at least..

 

[Kane]

For now it is at least the best harware I have that wont hurt my electricity bill at the end of the month and the same system is already running since 2-3 years on it's brother without the Proxmox UI, I do not know how much more than the 4GB currently used it will require really, but my hopes are high for it to work well without depleting all the availables resources.

I will try it this weekend and monitor it for some times before making a report on it then, thank you for you help!