Old dude needs help with HD's

[ConanTheLibrarian]

I'll be upfront.. I'm a tinkerer, and have never done anything like this.. but I am a bit older and things have sped up around me (it's the reason I'm here). I have built a few Linux computers, but I'm weak on the CLI side.

I have read numerous articles, forum posts and watched a few videos. I'm a bit confused, and as a matter of fact, I am sometimes left more confused by all the acronyms and difference of opinion(s). This is not a complaint on everyone trying to help, It's more of their advanced abilities vs my lack-of, and more my wanting to do this right the 1st time, and not get frustrated and/or waste anyone's time.

This is in no way a production server, unless the router thing pans out.. but I'll have my current router ready and updated on a regular basis, as a backup.

Motherboard: ASUS Prime B660M-A AC D4 LGA 1700
CPU: Intel Core i3 (12th Gen) i3-12100 Quad-core (4 Core) 3.30 GHz Processor
RAM: 32Gb G.Skill Ripjaws V Series Intel XMP DDR4
Hard drives: (2) Kingston NV2 500G M.2 2280 NVMe Internal SSD and (2) SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD322HJ 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5 (both with less than 100 hours of runtime). I'm not interested in b/u to NAS, across the network. Just 1 PC with all the HD's.

I'm looking to install 8.2, and apply only 2 VM's:

• Windows 11 Pro for use with my camera system (using an external USB 2Tb HD for video backups).
• OPNsense as my router.

What are the best options for my situation with PVE install, and VM's? What type of storage would be best suited.. and if Mirror would suffice both or ..maybe not. After that, I can at least start reapplying the rest of my setup with specific results in mind when looking online.

I hope you understand my apprehension, and thanks for your time.

 

[justinclift]

When you're going through the setup, in the installation screen where it asks which hard drive you want to install things on, I'd personally hit the Options button then change the Filesystem type to be "zfs (RAID1)". Then select both of your Kingston NVMe drives.

That will mirror the Proxmox install onto both of them, so that if one goes bad you'll still be able to boot and use your system without too much hassle.

Proxmox will also set up the remaining space on those two NVM drives so you can store ISO images (useful), and store virtual machines on them.

When the system has finished installing and rebooted, then you can go into the web interface for your new system and configure the 2x Samsung hard drives as additional storage however you want. Probably as another ZFS pool for things, but that'll more depend on what you're wanting to do.

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Ideally, you'll have some free time to just muck around with things for the learning side. So, just install Proxmox however you like with the awareness you'll probably be installing it again later on with different settings just to see how it goes with those instead. Possibly repeatedly if there's new stuff you want to try.

 

[justinclift]

Windows 11 Pro

With that specifically, it's probably worth taking a look at AtlasOS.net for stripping out the MS crap after install: https://atlasos.net

Been using it for a few weeks with a Win11 VM, and it makes a large, positive, difference compared to the stock Win11-with-MS-crap-installed.

 

[ConanTheLibrarian]

I will be starting my journey tomorrow.. and having a clearer picture is a great help. I'll read up on atlasos and find out if that'll be on my agenda as well. Thank you justinclift!

 

[justinclift]

All good, you're welcome.

 

[ConanTheLibrarian]

I tried 3 times to get the software to take. The 1st try, I loaded the software, updated it and was going to let it run a few days. Day 2, the system was shut down. I rebooted the system, and found a watchdog/timeout issue. I was going to let it run all night, but again, it shut down. I swapped out my video card with another "better" NVIDIA card, and removed the network card.. rebooted and got nothing. Memory tests passed, the hard drives were new and tested okay.

I deinstalled everything.. upgraded the motherboard to the latest firmware and started with just the video card, (2) SSD cards and reinstalled the software. I let it run for a couple of days, and the same thing started again. I bought a new Intel I5-12400 with onboard graphics (thinking either the video or SSD's could be bad). Installed everything and after an hour, the system was shut down again. It wouldn't power back on, just kept restarting after the motherboard beep.. but wouldn't get to the ProxMox boot screen. Could my Segotep 750W PS could be the culprit?

I uninstalled the SSD's, reinstalled the original video card and Windows 11 Pro hard drive. Rebooted into Windows, ran the updates, and added 4 new surveillance cameras (sapping more memory and cpu-bandwidth) and it's been on and running flawlessly for over a week now.

With all that's happened with ProxMox, all the while getting nowhere really, it's just not worth the time and energy to get it set up and into production. I just can't risk unknowns (as I've seen in these forums) taking down my VM's. With the yearly cost being prohibitive for me, I started losing interest in climbing a mountain that I just wasn't all that enthused about. Perhaps my lack of knowledge is the reason, but I'm also a realist. We aren't good together.

Justinclift.. thanks for your help, and may your next beer be delicious.

 

[justinclift]

No worries at all. If you do ever get the motivation to try this stuff again, please take a photo/screenshot/something/anything of the watchdog/timeout issue for people to look at.

Proxmox also recently (~2 weeks ago or so) updated the version of the Linux kernel used, and that's caused various people all kinds of weird problems. Whereas on my systems it's working fine (touch wood!).

The problems you hit may have been something to do with that.

That being said, hitting issues repeatedly just isn't a great experience. So switching to a system that you know works is completely understandable.