Newbie needs help for best storage practise during installation / Dell 730xd PERC H730P Mini

[fraank]

hi there

I´m new to proxmox and working my path through the 1000 possibilities that exist while setting up the new system.
I have a Dell poweredge 730xd with 16x 1TB HDD sittung on a PERC H730P Mini RAID Controller.

What is best practise to perform a good start with proxmox ?
1. Use the Hardware Controller and perform RAID 5 with etx4 für the OS ?
2. Use ZFS and let Proxmox completly manage all the physical disks by its own ?

Might be an easy question to answer, but I´m stuck here at the moment, what would be the best way to choose.

Thanks for any help appriciated,
F

 

[UdoB]

For me the best choice is always ZFS as the benefits of ZFS are very important for me. (Re-iterating: guaranteed data integrity, self-healing, redundancy, transparent compression, cheap snapshots, replication, ...)

You need to switch to HBA mode for this though. I can not tell if H730P Mini can do this out-of-the-box or if you have to flash it with the corresponding firmware...

Additionally I would replace two of the eight 16 harddisk by SSDs and configure them as a "Special Device".

If you build a cluster take look at Ceph - which also wants access to each and every disk without being blocked by the H730P...

Just my two €¢

 

[fraank]

For me the best choice is always ZFS as the benefits of ZFS are very important for me. (Re-iterating: guaranteed data integrity, self-healing, redundancy, transparent compression, cheap snapshots, replication, ...)

You need to switch to HBA mode for this though. I can not tell if H730P Mini can do this out-of-the-box or if you have to flash it with the corresponding firmware...

Additionally I would replace two of the eight 16 harddisk by SSDs and configure them as a "Special Device".

If you build a cluster take look at Ceph - which also wants access to each and every disk without being blocked by the H730P...

Just my two €¢

Hi Udo

Thanks for your advice. I think I will follow your suggestion and buy two more small SSD and save those as OS Drives. What to you mean as "Special Device" ? Would you install the Proxmox VE as ZFS system on these two SSD´s then ?

Thanks und Danke,
Frank

 

[UdoB]

What to you mean as "Special Device"

A special device is an optional element of a ZFS Pool. It will store Metadata and small files. It can not get removed again after being added and if it is lost all data in the pool is gone. (SLOG and Cache can be added and remove dynamically.) The Special device should have (at least) the same redundancy level as the rest of the pool.

The primary goal is to speed up especially access (read and write) to directory information, so a traversal of all files ("ls -R") will be drastically quicker than without this trick.

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/ZFS_on_Linux#sysadmin_zfs_special_device

Would you install the Proxmox VE as ZFS system on these two SSD´s then ?

Good question. There are a lot of valid combinations for the boot process...

The usual reason to combine different tasks (boot mechanism, rpool and things like this Special Device or Cache or SLOG or xyz ...) is that small systems just do not have enough independent drives. And yes, that does work in a wide variety of combinations. (You can opt to not use the complete space during installation.) But you seem to not have have this reason to do so.

A classic and clean approach would install PVE on an independent mirror. This is the recommended way to decouple problems with the OS from problems of a datastore.

Example 1: usually you can physically move the devices of a ZPool to another machine. If the Special Device is on the same media as the OS then this would render this machine unbootable.

Example 2: replacing a failing boot device is complicated enough. Normally you do this not very often and so you start with an elevated stress level. The steps are well documented but they are different from other systems and contain pitfalls. Adding an element of the data pool to this physical device complicates things. While it will not create problems in itself it raises complexity. And complexity is an amplifier for possible problems.

I am always trying to avoid such dependencies and keep a system clean and as simple as possible.

Just my 2 €¢

 

[fraank]

Thanks und Danke , Udo . For the moment all my questions have been solved. I would like to write back, if there is another question coming up. Pretty sure it won´t take long.

Greetings, F

 

[alexskysilk]

which also wants access to each and every disk without being blocked by the H730P...

Just fyi, the h730p can be configured for jbod mode.