Hi, I have two servers - the TS140 (Xeon E3 1245v3, 24GB ECC) and a much lower-powered HP N40L (AMD Turion II Neo, 12GB). Until this week, I was running ESXi on the TS140, but wiped the drives and am starting over with Proxmox.
One requirement is a sane and foolproof backup plan. I'm not sure how to configure these two systems so that my backups are safe, and the disks have a nice balance of performance / reliability.
Drives I Own:
Scenario 1:
Proxmox with SSD RAIDz2, local backups RAID10, and a separate backup server with ZFS-mirroring
TS140: Proxmox
Ditch the N40L, everything on TS140. Keep the hardware raid and don't use ZFS for disks on that card.
TS140: Proxmox
Swap current LSI 9260-8i with a proper HBA card for additional passthrough SATA ports
TS140: Proxmox
I'm really not sure what the best option is here. Any tips? I plan to host containers for software development and application testing on the proxmox machine, maybe play with kubernetes (inside VMs).
One requirement is a sane and foolproof backup plan. I'm not sure how to configure these two systems so that my backups are safe, and the disks have a nice balance of performance / reliability.
Drives I Own:
- (2x) 4TB WD Red
- (1x) 1TB WD Black
- (1x) 1TB Seagate Barracuda
- (2x) 120GB HP M700 SSDs (new)
- (1x) 180GB Intel SSD
- (1x) 120GB SSD Kingston: this drive is degraded, bad blocks according to SMART
- (1x) 120GB SSD Sandisk
- (2x) 1TB WD black, for RAIDZ2 or RAID10
- Possibly another 4TB Red if I decide to RAID5 or RAIDZ1 those
- HBA controller (model unknown)
- Only 5 SATA ports on TS140 motherboard
- TS140 has a 9260-8i RAID controller which cannot be flashed to IT mode to passthrough like an HBA. I will have to sell this and get an HBA if I need more than 5 SATA ports for ZFS. Otherwise it can be used to create RAID / LVM volumes (non-ZFS) on the TS140.
- Some of the drives are very old (Kingston SSD, Sandisk). Status reporting is fine except for the Kingston.
Scenario 1:
Proxmox with SSD RAIDz2, local backups RAID10, and a separate backup server with ZFS-mirroring
TS140: Proxmox
- OS/Primary Storage:
- RAIDZ2
- (4x) 120gb SSD
- No separate L2ARC/SLOG
- RAIDZ2
- Local Backups/extra space:
- RAID10, LVM, 4x1TB
- hardware raid on LSI MegaRAID card
- extra space would be allocated only to stuff that I'm not worried about losing, if this backup array happens to go down
- ZFS-mirrored (like RAID 1)
- (2x) WD Red 4TB
- 180GB SSD for L2ARC or SLOG? (I read that SLOG needs a write-optimized SSD, and most general purpose SSDs are read optimized)
- provides ZFS over iSCSI shares to Proxmox (there's a 3rd party adapter, would need to test it and make sure it works)
- Can always do NFS for backups if ZFS over iSCSI doesn't work
- possibly other uses
Ditch the N40L, everything on TS140. Keep the hardware raid and don't use ZFS for disks on that card.
TS140: Proxmox
- OS/Primary Storage:
- RAIDz2 (4x1TB)
- 1x180GB SSD - L2ARC
- These 5 drives on motherboard SATA ports
- Backups (multiple volumes available for backup):
- RAID1-2x4TB WD RED
- RAID5-3x120GB SSD
- Don't think these would be ZFS
Swap current LSI 9260-8i with a proper HBA card for additional passthrough SATA ports
TS140: Proxmox
- OS/Primary Storage:
- RAIDz2 (4x1TB)
- 120GB L2ARC SSD
- 120GB ZIL SSD
- Remote backups (ZFS over iSCSI or NFS)
- ZFS-mirrored (like RAID 1)
- (2x) WD RED 4TB
- 180GB SSD SLOG
- 120GB SSD L2ARC
I'm really not sure what the best option is here. Any tips? I plan to host containers for software development and application testing on the proxmox machine, maybe play with kubernetes (inside VMs).
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