Newbie question

[peterritter]

Hi, I'm new to Proxmox and I'm already about to give up and go back to hyper-V :-( I'm having problems setting up a VM/drive. I think there are two issues. First, my computer has two RAID drives - one drive in RAID 1 (2 disks mirrored) and another in RAID5 (3 disks) . But in Proxmox I see all 5 physical disks (sda ...sde), but not my Raid drives. So that is confusing. Is there something I should have different during installation? The server is a small HP Proliant machine.

The second problem is that when I try to create some space on one of my disks it gives me the follwing error:

pvcreate '/dev/sde' error: 1 existing signature left on the device

Do I need to format these drives before doing anything?

Another issues is that the installation created a PVE on /dev/sda3 and it is 97% full (465GB) - I don't see how it would be completely full. It's pretty confusing. Maybe somebody can point me to the right documentation.

Thanks advance!

 

[Dunuin]

Hi, I'm new to Proxmox and I'm already about to give up and go back to hyper-V :-( I'm having problems setting up a VM/drive. I think there are two issues. First, my computer has two RAID drives - one drive in RAID 1 (2 disks mirrored) and another in RAID5 (3 disks) . But in Proxmox I see all 5 physical disks (sda ...sde), but not my Raid drives. So that is confusing. Is there something I should have different during installation? The server is a small HP Proliant machine.

Are you talking about hardware raid or software raid like pools you create in windows? If you see all 5 drives it sounds like software raid. With hardware raid you should normally only see 2 drives.

The second problem is that when I try to create some space on one of my disks it gives me the follwing error:
pvcreate '/dev/sde' error: 1 existing signature left on the device
Do I need to format these drives before doing anything?

Yes, these should be fresh without partitions.

Another issues is that the installation created a PVE on /dev/sda3 and it is 97% full (465GB) - I don't see how it would be completely full. It's pretty confusing. Maybe somebody can point me to the right documentation.

You used LVM as installation storage? Then it should be normal because LVM will use the complete drive except for 16GB. But the 97% only tell you that 97% are used by LVM, not that the LVM is full.

 

[peterritter]

Hello Dunuin
Thanks for this reply! I think you are right, I just checked my machine and it seems to be a sotware RAID. I wasn't even aware of this - I should have bought a different model! It's all starting to make more sense to me now. I was able to create a new ZFS and install a CentOS on it. So I am making some progress. I think I'll be all right now. Thanks for the help!

 

[Dunuin]

Hello Dunuin
Thanks for this reply! I think you are right, I just checked my machine and it seems to be a sotware RAID. I wasn't even aware of this - I should have bought a different model! It's all starting to make more sense to me now. I was able to create a new ZFS and install a CentOS on it. So I am making some progress. I think I'll be all right now. Thanks for the help!

The good thing is you can use ZFS. Wouldn't be possible with a hardware raid controller.
You could install Proxmox on a ZFS mirror (like raid1) and later create a second ZFS pool but with raidz1 (like raid5) if you want the same configuration like before.
But if all 5 drives are the same I would recommend using a 4 drives as a ZFS stripped mirror (like raid10) for better performance.