My first Proxmox-install: How to best set up the disks given beginner's hardware limitations?

[trollbot13]

Dear experts,
I am going to take the plunge soon and install my very first Proxmox system.
Target hardware is an not-so-new mini-PC (M900 tiny) with 16 GB RAM, one NVMe-SSD (128 GB) and a SATA-HDD (256 GB), all of it used consumer-grade.
Intended usage is as a small home server in my home network for file sharing, media server, and other "minor" stuff.
The data for that will reside on an external btrfs-formatted USB disk.

After reading the documentation and on the forum, I believe that for my first steps and to save on wear and tear of the internal SSD, it would be best to use ext4 and LVM for my initial setup.
Things may change later, once I gain experience, speed becomes more important, a second node joins in, ...
In this I would prefer to have everything "system" on the SSD for fast response times, and swap and VM / containers on the HDD.
I am not yet very much concerned with boot time of the guest systems and would like their logs not to eat up the SSD cells.

The docs state "The installer creates a Volume Group (VG) called pve, and additional LogicalVolumes (LVs) called root, data, and swap, if ext4 or xfs is used.", so everything would end up either on a single disk or spread around over both - situations I would like to avoid for the reasons above.

So, in your experience, is there any sense in what I am trying to do?
And if so: How do I convince the installer not to put everything into a single VG?
From what I understand, the only reason to use LVM in my situation at all is Proxmox's standard of setting up the VM and containers as virtual disks using LVM functionality?

If my ideas are total nonsense: What would you suggest instead?
I would have liked to use btrfs, like I do on my PC, but read a lot here about problems, required workarounds, tech-preview status etc., so I decided to stick with "the standard" - and ZFS with 16 GB RAM would probably not solve my issues either.

Thanks a lot in advance for your help with my first steps in the realm of Proxmox.

 

[Onslow]

Welcome to the Forum, @trollbot13 !
Be warned that I'm not an expert ;-).

I don't remember if the installer allows this (you'd have to enter the "Advanced options" and see).

If not, after installing you can remove the thin-pool LV (called data) and extend the root LV and use it e.g. for backups.

And on the second disk create another PV and VG and a thin pool. Then create a storage using this pool.

See https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/ for details.
Good luck!

 

[odhiambo]

I found this video very useful. I am as new as 2 weeks with Proxmox!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNS_JoHFhg&t=1197s - Just ignore the netbird bit.

 

[trollbot13]

Welcome to the Forum, @trollbot13 !
Be warned that I'm not an expert ;-).

I don't remember if the installer allows this (you'd have to enter the "Advanced options" and see).

If not, after installing you can remove the thin-pool LV (called data) and extend the root LV and use it e.g. for backups.

And on the second disk create another PV and VG and a thin pool. Then create a storage using this pool.

See https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/ for details.
Good luck!

Thanks for the friendly greeting and your reply.
Will take a look if the installer allows for splitting the VG as you describe. Have not worked with LVM before, but should be able to manage.
One question, though: How would Proxmox know to use the manually created "data"- and "swap"-LV on the second disk, instead of looking for them in the original location? They are in a different PV and VG, after all - or is only the name of the LV relevant?

 

[trollbot13]

I found this video very useful. I am as new as 2 weeks with Proxmox!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNS_JoHFhg&t=1197s - Just ignore the netbird bit.

Thanks for the video, will take a look.
Glad to see I an not the only newbie here.
How do you like Proxmox so far? Any pitfalls to report that I could avoid?

 

[Onslow]

Will take a look if the installer allows for splitting the VG as you describe. Have not worked with LVM before, but should be able to manage.

Not splitting the VG in fact. The original VG (called "pve") should still use only the first disk (SSD in your setup).
And the second disk (HDD in your setup) is to be used for the second VG (you can call it whatever you want, e.g. vg2).

One question, though: How would Proxmox know to use the manually created "data"- and "swap"-LV on the second disk, instead of looking for them in the original location? They are in a different PV and VG, after all - or is only the name of the LV relevant?

Sorry, I forgot you also wanted to move swap to the HDD.
You can remove also "swap" LV in the "pve" VG.
And create it in the vg2. No, the name of the LV on its own is not relevant nor sufficient.
Of course change the swap's location in the operating system.

For using the new "data" thin-pool you must create a storage pool
(https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvesm.html#_storage_pools).

I advise that after fresh installation you copy all the /etc (and directories below it) to some other place, like a USB stick - to have a reference pattern. Generally you want to recreate the configurations but in other places / disks.