Newbie- need advice on storage choices

[paulflan79]

I'm new to Proxmox and the forum,
Now i'm wanting to setup a 2 or 3 node setup if possible sharing the same storage from a single server with the rest of the nodes ?
is this possible please or do all nodes need their own local storage in order to run the VM's from ?
As i have a HP DL585 G7 with 320Gb of ram and 48 cores and a choice of using a HP P822 raid card (i understand this is a bad idea ?) or better still a basic LSI HBA with my HP Storageworks d2600, and would i be better off using a IBM M1050 controller in JBOD/HBA mode in place of the built in HP P410i to use the internal 8 2.5" bays ?
And a bunch of 1U compute nodes all with 146Gb sas drives for booting if it's possible,
Now i have a selection of storage disks to choose from,
1x 250Gb nvme SSD on PCIE card
1x 1Tb nvme SSD on PCIE card for the DL585 for a cache
10x 128Gb SSD's
1x 1Tb SSD's
3x 500Gb SSD's
probably over 10x 1Tb drives
2x 4Tb drives
4X 6Tb drives
a crap load of 146Gb sas drives
My Questions...

Is it possible to share a storage pool of VM's with other compute nodes even if i used some of the smaller 128Gb ssd's to cache the VM's from the main storage pool onto that node if this is in fact possible ? just a simple no and i'll scrap the idea

secondly and most importantly, what would be my best options for storage and type, zfs... ect. ?
12x slow spinning rust, do all the hard drives need to be the same size when setting up a redundant array like they do with hardware raid ? if so think i will go with the 4x 6Tb drives in one array for backups and 8x 1Tb in the otherfor VM storage
My other question is how can i best make use of the SSD's and the NVME drives i have to make the storage more responsive please capable of doing regular backups or snapshots of the VM's ?

main use case being a WordPress and Moodle server to which I'm sure the HP DL585 is more than capable of doing on its own for the next 3 months or however long this virus sticks around however would like to play around doing far more stuff,

any help, support and guidance would be gratefully received

 

[Dominic]

Hi!

Proxmox VE is very flexible in regard to storages. You can, for example, create a NFS or GlusterFS on your storage server and put VMs from your compute nodes onto this network storage. Check out the Proxmox VE reference documentation for a full list and the Proxmox VE wiki for details about all the storage types.

Hardware RAID is not a bad idea for all storage types. It is a bad idea for ZFS, for example. This could be what raised your concerns about RAID in Proxmox VE, so check out the wiki page for ZFS (see link above) and the relevant chapter of the documentation.

Depending on which storage type you choose, you can use your fast disks as caches

Best,
Dominic

 

[paulflan79]

Hi!

Proxmox VE is very flexible in regard to storages. You can, for example, create a NFS or GlusterFS on your storage server and put VMs from your compute nodes onto this network storage. Check out the Proxmox VE reference documentation for a full list and the Proxmox VE wiki for details about all the storage types.

Hardware RAID is not a bad idea for all storage types. It is a bad idea for ZFS, for example. This could be what raised your concerns about RAID in Proxmox VE, so check out the wiki page for ZFS (see link above) and the relevant chapter of the documentation.

Depending on which storage type you choose, you can use your fast disks as caches

Best,
Dominic

Thank you for quick response, The Documentation you linked to is far clearer than I've found using google

If i setup my ZFS storage using the SSD's as cache etc on my main server will i be able to access that storage pool from the other compute nodes ?

As i may just setup the main storage server and get used to using everything and look into adding compute nodes at a later date however would like to know if its still possible please

 

[Dominic]

ZFS itself is only local. You would have to add some "Shared" storage (wiki) on top of it.