New setup with disparate hardware; have many questions....

[walstib2]

Have a small Proxmox setup at home with two DELL T30's 32GB ram 1 xeon CPU and ZFS with SSD caching set up. It's been great for playing, testing and running the few VMs that I use at home.

Now the fun part... I teach at the local community college and was asked recently to look at hosting a couple of my classes online to free up some classroom space. Nothing terrible, a Windows 7 or Windows 10 VM for each student and a Linux VM for each student. Was told that they had a couple of real "NICE" servers that IT services could give us.

When they dropped off the equipment I was really happy when I looked at the first one; its a DELL 730XD tricked out pretty good, the 2nd one is a DELL 720XD, not as tricked out and then it goes down hill from there.

Here are the hardware specs for what I have to work with:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PowerEdge R730xd
CPU(s) - 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2667 v4 @ 3.20GH
Memory - 384.00 GB ECC
HD(s) - 6x HGST 560GB SAS HDD
12x Toshiba 960GB SAS SSD
All drives conected to PERC H730P Adapter

Network - Intel(R) 2P X540/2P I350 rNDC
2x 1GB
2x 10GB
-------------------------------------------------------------

Poweredge R720xd
CPU(s) - 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2667 v4 @ 3.20GH
Memory - 256.00 GB ECC
HD(s) - 1x 1.6TB Intel SSD in pcix16 slot
12x 300GB Toshiba SAS HDD
all HDD drives hooked to Dell PERC H710P

Network - 4x 1GB I350 Gigabit Network Connection
2x 10GB Intel X540-AT2
-------------------------------------------------------------

Poweredge R210
CPU(s) - 1 Intel Xeon X340 @2.4GH
Memory - 16GB ECC
HD(s) - 2x 500GB TOSHIBA SAS
Network - 2x BCM5716 Gigabit Ethernet

-------------------------------------------------------------
Poweredge T410 _ Currently used as a FREENAS box for sharing files
CPU(s) - 2x Intel Xeon X3430 2.4GH
MEMORY - 32GB ECC
HD(s) - 6x 1TB Seagate NAS drives (SATA)


The school has a 10GB dell switch that we have access to, as well as a normal 48port 1GB switch for the classroom
____________________________________________________________________________________

The questions I have to start are:
1: Do away with hardware raid and use ZFS?
2: The systems are too disparate to use CEPH correct?
3: Thinking of using the R210 as nothing more than the "cluster controller" any problems with that?
4: With that much SSD storage do I even need the FreeNas server ?
5: With the majority of the storage on the 730XD should I set it up for storage of VM's only? Use it as a iSCSI or NFS share?

My goal is to have approximately 60 VM's available to the students to access. Most of the time there will not be any more than 5 or 10 logged in at a time, but I am sure when the chapter labs are due at 11:59pm Sunday night it will probably have 30 VM's in use at the same time. I don't have to have High Availability at this stage, but would like to plan on it in the future if this works. There is no current budget to buy any more equipment / hardware / license at this time, but if this works I can see them allowing me to spend some more money in the Spring of 2019. So for now I am stuck with what I have.

So to sum it up in one final question: If this was your pile of parts, how would you set it up?

Thanks in advance,
Walstib2

 

[fireon]

1: Do away with hardware raid and use ZFS?

Yes, if the controllers can switch to HBA mode. I think ZFS and the features are the best. But only if you really use/need the zfs features.

2: The systems are too disparate to use CEPH correct?

Yes. Maybe in the future you can change someting?

3: Thinking of using the R210 as nothing more than the "cluster controller" any problems with that?

For some LXC-Containers, like CheckMK Monitoring...

4: With that much SSD storage do I even need the FreeNas server ?

Proxmox with ZFS is the best NAS, we use that all the time.

5: With the majority of the storage on the 730XD should I set it up for storage of VM's only? Use it as a iSCSI or NFS share?

NFS is much more easier, and not faster/slower then iscsi.

The important with is that your cluster will good to use: On every node should be on of the same storage type, if not, you can't move VM's between the nodes. In your actual hardwaresituation ceph is not a good idea i would like to do everything with ZFS. With that you have also the replicationfeature in the webinterface. At the CMD you are also able to move VM's on ZFS beween the host without downtime. But i prefer the replication.

 

[walstib2]

Thanks for the reply and input Fireon.

In reply to your comments:
1: I will look at the controllers tomorrow and see if they support HBA mode. I have been running ZFS on my proxmox servers and have had good luck with it.

2: Hope to eventually get a matched quartet of the dell 730XDs. But with the budget the way it is .... not happening anytime soon.

3: That makes sense. I completely overlooked the LXC containers for other applications I would need. Thanks!

4 & 5: Is it advisable to run the NFS share on same machines as Proxmox hosting VMs?

Migration between running machines is not a big concern right now. The students labs will not depend on previous work, so if we lose a VM and have to spin up a new one from a template its not a problem.

Regards,
Walstib2

 

[fireon]

4 & 5: Is it advisable to run the NFS share on same machines as Proxmox hosting VMs?

Yes, then i would connect over tcp/socket. So... same, same.