Need help determining Proxmox drive configuration

[josh.greyz]

I'm new to Proxmox and have only previously installed it directly on one drive in a homelab server. Now I'm ready to create a small Proxmox server and need some help determining the drive configuration to use with the hardware I have.

The system I have contains the following drive inputs: (1) 3.5" SATA III and (2) NVME.
The two NVME in this system have RAID functionality.

Can both the Proxmox install and ISOs live on the SATA drive and then I would RAID the two NVME for VMs?

Also, as a RAID question - am I better off using the system's built-in hardware RAID or should I instead setup the RAID 1 with software using ZFS?

Thanks for any help, it is much appreciated.

 

[Dunuin]

You did't told us alot of important stuff:

1.) the 3.5" SATA III is a HDD?
2.) what NVMe SSD models do you use?
3.) what will your workload look like?
4.) whats your backup strategy?
5.) your other hardware like if ECC RAM is used, raid controller/HBA and so on

I personally don't see the point installing PVE on a single SATA disk and VMs on raid1 SSD array. Raid never replaces a backup so you still need to backup your VMs somewhere preferably on a dedicated disk (where the sata would make sense for) or NAS. Raid1 is nice to have for reliability and less work/frustration when your SSD dies. But then you want raid1 for your system disk too. Also keep in mind that VM disks are useless without the config files that are stored on your system disks (and most people forget to back them up too and then ask in the forums how to get the VMs working again on a freshly installed PVE because they didn't use raid1 for the system disk and lost them without a backup).

What I would do is using the two NVMe SSD in raid1 and using them for booting + root filesystem + VM/LXC storage. So everything runs of these two NVMe SSDs, so everything can survive a single failing disk. The 3,5" SATA disk I then would use for backups in case you don't already got a NAS.
If you got enterprise/datacenter grade SSDs, ECC RAM and a HBA/normal disk controller and not a real HW raid I would use ZFS.
Otherwise I would use LVM-Thin with that onboard pseudo HW raid so your NVMe will last a bit longer.

 

[josh.greyz]

My apologies for not providing important info. I'm planning on using a HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Desktop Mini.

Here is the info you had asked for:
1. It's a SATA connector for a small mechanical HD or SSD.
2. I have not bought any drives yet, which is why I am asking here. The plan was to have the same exactl model & size for these.
3. Workload - myself and a small group of others will use this server.
4. New to this, so this was not considered and I'm open to hearing backup solutions that others have had success with.
5. No ECC RAM; system comes with hardware RAID; don't know what an HBA is; anything else I should add here?

The (1) SATA drive could be used for backups, but then it would need to be large space-wise and bigger than the NVME drives, right? Is there functionality baked into ProxMox to backup data to a separate drive inside the system (or to an external NAS, NFS Share, etc)?

Alright, the goal is that if one drive dies that the other will be good - so this sounds like a plan to use RAID 1 on the (2) NVME SSDs. Thanks for the tip about using LVM-Thin with the HW RAID to extend the life of the NVME SSDs.

 

[Dunuin]

5. No ECC RAM; system comes with hardware RAID; don't know what an HBA is; anything else I should add here?

A HBA is a PCIe card with a disk controller without any raid. You dont want any raid or other abstaction layer when using software raid like ZFS.

The (1) SATA drive could be used for backups, but then it would need to be large space-wise and bigger than the NVME drives, right? Is there functionality baked into ProxMox to backup data to a separate drive inside the system (or to an external NAS, NFS Share, etc)?

You could use vzdump backups which are slow and big but dont require any additional software. Or you could setup a Proxmox Backup Servers (PBS) which will be faster and saves alot of space because of deduplication. Ideally you install PBS to a dedicaded second server but using a LXC, VM or baremetal beside PVE will work too.
Both can store your backups on an internal SATA disk and you indeed might want that doisk to be bigger to be able to store several backups of all guests.

 

[josh.greyz]

For anyone else planning on using a HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Desktop Mini for Proxmox, be aware that the "hardware RAID" is not supported. Also the BIOS on this system is one of the most complicated ones I've encountered in my 30 years of tech - I still cannot find documentation on many of the options. In the end I used ZFS RAID-1 on the two NVMe drives and that worked. Thanks again for your help Dunuin.