New to VE

[DesignPlayBox]

Hi all,

One of my team mates have suggested that I check out VE as I'm always Distro Hopping. However I do have a few questions before trying it out to make sure I set my expectations correctly.

First though, currently purchasing a second GPU is not an option, please answer the questions with this in mind.

While I realize the host OS is mainly for doing Virtual environments, if I don't have any Guest OSes running is it possible to use it as a normal install of Debian? ie:

1) Can I install the Steam Runtime, and play games directly on the hardware with the host OS?

 

[Dunuin]

Hi all,

One of my team mates have suggested that I check out VE as I'm always Distro Hopping. However I do have a few questions before trying it out to make sure I set my expectations correctly.

First though, currently purchasing a second GPU is not an option, please answer the questions with this in mind.

While I realize the host OS is mainly for doing Virtual environments, if I don't have any Guest OSes running is it possible to use it as a normal install of Debian? ie:

1) Can I install the Steam Runtime, and play games directly on the hardware with the host OS?

Proxmox VE installed from the PVE ISO is meant to be run headless, so it got no desktop environment. If you want some kind of normal computer you should install a normal Debian with the desktop environment of your choice and install the proxmox-ve package ontop of it.
And I don't see the point running steam directly on the PVE host. Most stream games won't run because they are only made to run on Win and not on linux. Would be way more useful to run steam inside a Win VM and passthrough your PCIe GPU to that VM and use something like the iGPU or a cheap GT710 (20-50€) for your PVE. But yes, playing Steam games on a Debian with PVE ontop should work.

 

[DesignPlayBox]

Proxmox VE installed from the PVE ISO is meant to be run headless, so it got no desktop environment. If you want some kind of normal computer you should install a normal Debian with the desktop environment of your choice and install the proxmox-ve package ontop of it.
And I don't see the point running steam directly on the PVE host. Most stream games won't run because they only made to run on Win and not on linux. Would be way more useful to run steam inside a Win VM and passthrough your PCIe GPU to that VM and use something like the iGPU or a GT710 for your PVE. But yes, playing Steam games on a Debian with PVE ontop should work.

Thanks actually for quite a while Steam has had their own version of Wine which runs most games.
Does it have to be Debian? or can it be Ubuntu?
If it has to be Debian any particular version?

 

[Dunuin]

Proxmox VE as an OS is based on Debian and is using a custom Ubuntu Kernel. So I would guess you run into less problems if you just use a Debian because everything is made to run on that. Which Debian you need to choose depends on the Version of Proxmox VE you want to use. PVE7.0 needs a Debian 11 (Bullseye) and PVE6.4 needs a Debian 10 (Buster). There are installation guides for how to install PVE ontop of both in the wiki.

 

[DesignPlayBox]

For a system with the following can you advise how to best configure it for as much space as possible for VMs:

* 256 GB NVME (assuming this will be the boot drive)
* Dual 8 TB drives
* Full install of Debian

 

[Dunuin]

Storage is a complex topic and "as much storage as possible" is most of the time not what you really want in a server.
It also really depends on your hardware. What kind of mainboard, what HDD/SSDs models, is there a PCI HBA or HW raid card, how much RAM do you got and is it ECC or not?
Then there is the question if you want protection again bit rot (so that your data doesn't corrupt oder time) and if you don't want to loose all data if one of your drives dies. If you think the last 2 things are important you dont want as much VM storage as possible.

And in general HDDs are quite bad as a VM storage because they can'T handle all the small IO the VMs are creation. So you get a high IO wait and disk latency because HDDs got so low IOPS.

I would use the NVME SSD for boot + VM storage and use the HDDs as a cold storage and bring folders on them into VMs using SMB/NFS or into LXCs using bind-mounts.

 

[DesignPlayBox]

I have 48GB of RAM, the hard drives are NAT drives.
Currently can only use software raid, had been setting it up as a LVM to have 16TB of space available usually as my /home parition
I generally the super important files online as backups so its not a huge issue if the drive goes down.

 

[Dunuin]

I have 48GB of RAM, the hard drives are NAT drives.

I guess you mean NAS drives? It is really important which exact model. There are for example "WD Red" NAS drives that use SMR and there are "WD Red Plus" and "WD Red Pro" NAS drives that use CMR. SMR drives are really crappy at writing and should be avoided running in a server, specially when ZFS is used for software raid.

Currently can only use software raid, had been setting it up as a LVM to have 16TB of space available usually as my /home parition
I generally the super important files online as backups so its not a huge issue if the drive goes down.

You should read about bit rot. Backups don't help you much if your data silently corrupts over time without you being able to notice it. Long story short you are backing up corrupted files and think everything is save, because you got your backup if a drive fails but all your backups only contain these already corrupted files. Against this silent corruption stuff like ZFS, btrfs and CEPH use checksumming and you generally want some kind of raid with parity (raid1/raid10/raid5/raid6) so there is parity data that these filesystem can use to repair these corrupted files. So raid isn't only about redundancy if a drive dies.
Its basically doing the same for data on your HDDs/SSDs what ECC is doing for data in RAM.

But if you don't care about corrupted files or downtimes raid0 using LVM should be fine.

 

[DesignPlayBox]

Seems I misremembered they are actually "Seagate BarraCuda 8TB Internal Hard Drive HDD – 3.5 Inch Sata 6 Gb/s 5400 RPM 256MB Cache for Computer Desktop PC" but not worried about bitrot
Thanks for your help.