New VE installation on 3 SSDs - best setup

[s0ma]

Hey,

Just built a small home lab and I'm new to Proxmox VE.
I have 3 SSDs in my small server (with 8 GB RAM, will upgrade to 16GB eventually).

1x 256GB SSD (on a slow SATA3 port)
2x 1TB SSD (both on a faster SATA6 port)

One of the VMs is going to be a TrueNAS and the other one using docker and other stuff for my coding shenanigans. For now I only have one SATA3 on my mini-ITX board left and no mounting in the case.

So I guess the question is. What would be the best disk setup for that?

1. Proxmox and the VMs on the 256GB SSD with the 2 other SSDS as mirrored ZFS Pool for storage?
2. Proxmox and the VMs on the 1TB SSDs as ZFS RAID1 and then maybe the 256GB as cache for the ZFS?
3. Proxmox and the VMs on the 1TB SSDs as ZFS RAID1 and then the extra SSD just as storage assigned to one of the VMs?
4. ??? Maybe something I didn't even think of?

Any help would be great.
Thanks heaps ^^

 

[Dunuin]

One of the VMs is going to be a TrueNAS

TrueNAS got a minimum RAM requirement of 8GB. PVE 2GB. So with that single VM alone you should have like 11+GB of RAM. And TrueNAS uses ZFS, so consumer SSDs aren't great and I would bet you didn't bought a proper SSD with power-loss protection. ZFS also benefits from ECC RAM your MiniPC probably can't use. With that low-end consumer hardware I would probably run a OpenMediaVault VM or some Fileserver LXC and not TrueNAS.

1. Proxmox and the VMs on the 256GB SSD with the 2 other SSDS as mirrored ZFS Pool for storage?

TrueNAS uses ZFS. You don't want to run ZFS on top of ZFS because of the terrible write amplification. In that case I would use disk passthrough to passthrough the 2x 1TB SSDs into the TrueNAS VM and create the raid1 inside the VM. But disk passthrough isn`t real passthrough and the VM is still working with virtual disks so stuff like SMART won't work inside TrueNAS. And you would be limited to 256GB for all your VMs as well as ISOs, system, ...

2. Proxmox and the VMs on the 1TB SSDs as ZFS RAID1 and then maybe the 256GB as cache for the ZFS?

There are very few cases where a cache SSD with ZFS makes sense. Especially not if that SSD is the slowest disk.

3. Proxmox and the VMs on the 1TB SSDs as ZFS RAID1 and then the extra SSD just as storage assigned to one of the VMs?

There is no built-in way to backup your PVE installation yet. I would always run the system disks as a raid1. And ideally all disks as mirrors or with parity.

 

[s0ma]

Thanks for the big and comprehensive response.

Yes, it's just going to be a very cheap and low-end home lab for me to learn a bit about virtualization etc.
I think I'll go with option 1 and use OpenMediaVault. And also I'm going to get some 16GB of RAM ^^

Thanks again. This was very helpful.