New to Proxmox and after recommendations.

[GDMorry]

Hello there everyone, I am relatively new to Proxmox and although having a tinker I am yet to finalise my installation.

My system will basically be as follows;

ASRock EP2C602-4L/D16 OR Supermicro X9DRI-LN4F+ (I have both boards and am after advice on which one would be best suited)


2X E5-2670 XEONs
512GB ram 16X 32GB Hynix DDR3 4Rx4 PC3-14900L-13-11-C0 ECC HMT84GL7AMR4C-RD Server Memory RAM
4x HGST 4TB 7.2K 6Gbps 3.5" SAS Hard Drives
4x 6TB WD WD60EFRX-68L0BN1 Western Digital RED NASware 3.0

Install Proxmox on 2X liteon ssd 256gb (Hardare raid or ZFS install?)
2x HP NC523SFP Dual Port 10GbE 593717-B21 593742-001 593715-001 PCIe Server Adapter (for 10GBe network)

I basically want to run proxmox with truenas, pfsense, Ubuntu server & Windows server. I am most certain I will also be playing around with other VM’s


I have had a quick browse of the forums on my phone so I am sorry if I have missed any similar thread that may answer some of my queries.

1. ASRock EP2C602-4L/D16 OR Supermicro X9DRI-LN4F+ ??

2. How to Install Proxmox on 2X liteon ssd 256gb (mirrored?)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Cheers. Glen

 

[Dunuin]

1. ASRock EP2C602-4L/D16 OR Supermicro X9DRI-LN4F+ ??

I like the Supermicro boards. Super reliable and very long driver/bios/IPMI-firmware support. It also got one more PCIe 16x slot.

2. How to Install Proxmox on 2X liteon ssd 256gb (mirrored?)

Non of the two boards got a buildin HW raid controller. So I would say use ZFS but for ZFS enterprise SSDs are recommended and I guess your Liteons are just using consumer SSDs. ZFS will create alot of wear and you loose alot of performance, especially if you got consumer SSDs that can'T handle sync writes well.

And for TrueNAS you might want to buy a HBA card (a Dell PERC H310 flashed to IT mode for example is a cheap option (around 35€) and works perfectly fine for up to 8 HDDs in TrueNAS) so you can use PCI passthrough to passthrough the complete HBA with all HDDs attached to it to your TrueNAS VM. Thats the only way how TrueNAS could directly talk to the physical disks. All other ways your HDDs will be virtualized so you get additional overhead and stuff like SMART isn't working.

And you might want to get 2 or 4 enterprise SSDs and use them with ZFS as a mirror (raid1) or striped mirror (raid10) as a VM storage. HDDs are bad to store VMs because they can't handle all the IOPS.

 

[GDMorry]

I like the Supermicro boards. Super reliable and very long driver/bios/IPMI-firmware support. It also got one more PCIe 16x slot.

Non of the two boards got a buildin HW raid controller. So I would say use ZFS but for ZFS enterprise SSDs are recommended and I guess your Liteons are just using consumer SSDs. ZFS will create alot of wear and you loose alot of performance, especially if you got consumer SSDs that can'T handle sync writes well.

And for TrueNAS you might want to buy a HBA card (a Dell PERC H310 flashed to IT mode for example is a cheap option (around 35€) and works perfectly fine for up to 8 HDDs in TrueNAS) so you can use PCI passthrough to passthrough the complete HBA with all HDDs attached to it to your TrueNAS VM. Thats the only way how TrueNAS could directly talk to the physical disks. All other ways your HDDs will be virtualized so you get additional overhead and stuff like SMART isn't working.

And you might want to get 2 or 4 enterprise SSDs and use them with ZFS as a mirror (raid1) or striped mirror (raid10) as a VM storage. HDDs are bad to store VMs because they can't handle all the IOPS.

Awesome thanks for all the info.
I do have a LSI MegaRAID SAS 9261-8i card somewhere but I’m not sure that it’s a HBA Card

 

[Dunuin]

For ZFS you really need to use a HBA that supports IT (initiator target). A raid cards wouldn't be reliable because ZFS needs direct access to the disks without any abstraction layer in between.

 

[LnxBil]

I'd also recommend adding ZFS special devices (metadata) to get the most power out of your spinning rust, if you can squeeze in two additional disks (smaller e.g. 256GB Enterprise SSDs).