This is a home lab environment, nothing is critical, even though I have my main router Openwrt and AdGuard Home both running in VMs, I can easily rebuild them from scratch if necessary. Mostly a learning environment, but, want to do it right.
I have a 3 node Proxmox cluster, with ZFS on each node to store the VM/CT, I am also using VM Replication across nodes in case any of them crashes, and there is no possibility of recovery, I can manually run the VMs from the other nodes. The 3 nodes have 2.5Gbps network cards, and are connected to a 2.5Gbps switch as well, for management, replication and general network traffic. Overall in the house mostly MacBooks, iPhones, iPads, some IoTs, no games, and 1 streaming (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) device at a time, so very low profile.
As an additional safety measure, in one of the nodes, the one with no VMs running, I have virtualized PBS (Proxmox Backup Server), the node has 16GB RAM, and a 4 core CPU. Here are the questions:
1.- The minimal PBS requirements state 4 core CPU core, 8G RAM and 32G of boot disk, and that's what I have assigned to it (4C, 8G, 32G), also the CPU type is host, even though with x86-64-v2-AES worked fine. Now, looking at the PBS dashboard and VM dashboard in Proxmox, it barely uses any CPU, memory is less than 5% and disk is at less than 10% (I have a separate disk than boot, for backup storage T5). The expected VM load will be to backup around 10 VMs spread throughout the night daily, nothing else during the day, also the host/node doesn't have any other VM/CT running, those are on the other two nodes. Is it really necessary such high specs for it to work properly? Can I lower the hardware assigned to it below the minimum requirements?
2.- I am using an external USB-C 2TB Samsung T5 SSD for backups, connected to a USB 3.1 Gen 1 port with specs of 5Gbps in the node where PBS is running. I haven't configured the T5 disk in the node, I am passing it through via Add --> USB Device in the Hardware section of the VM, will I get the full speed of the USB port in the node with this method inside the VM? Also, I can pass the T5, using PCI Passthrough (Ekhart Lake USB 3.10 XHCI) but I don't like that, because the whole 8GB RAM gets allocated to the VM (requirement when doing PCI passthrough), when in reality is using less than 1GB, memory that can be used for other things in the node. Bottom line will USB Device give me the same performance as PCI? Not that it's super critical, because, my bottleneck is the 2.5Gbps network, because the VMs to be backed up are on the other 2 nodes.
Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to provide enough information about the scenario, thanks
I have a 3 node Proxmox cluster, with ZFS on each node to store the VM/CT, I am also using VM Replication across nodes in case any of them crashes, and there is no possibility of recovery, I can manually run the VMs from the other nodes. The 3 nodes have 2.5Gbps network cards, and are connected to a 2.5Gbps switch as well, for management, replication and general network traffic. Overall in the house mostly MacBooks, iPhones, iPads, some IoTs, no games, and 1 streaming (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) device at a time, so very low profile.
As an additional safety measure, in one of the nodes, the one with no VMs running, I have virtualized PBS (Proxmox Backup Server), the node has 16GB RAM, and a 4 core CPU. Here are the questions:
1.- The minimal PBS requirements state 4 core CPU core, 8G RAM and 32G of boot disk, and that's what I have assigned to it (4C, 8G, 32G), also the CPU type is host, even though with x86-64-v2-AES worked fine. Now, looking at the PBS dashboard and VM dashboard in Proxmox, it barely uses any CPU, memory is less than 5% and disk is at less than 10% (I have a separate disk than boot, for backup storage T5). The expected VM load will be to backup around 10 VMs spread throughout the night daily, nothing else during the day, also the host/node doesn't have any other VM/CT running, those are on the other two nodes. Is it really necessary such high specs for it to work properly? Can I lower the hardware assigned to it below the minimum requirements?
2.- I am using an external USB-C 2TB Samsung T5 SSD for backups, connected to a USB 3.1 Gen 1 port with specs of 5Gbps in the node where PBS is running. I haven't configured the T5 disk in the node, I am passing it through via Add --> USB Device in the Hardware section of the VM, will I get the full speed of the USB port in the node with this method inside the VM? Also, I can pass the T5, using PCI Passthrough (Ekhart Lake USB 3.10 XHCI) but I don't like that, because the whole 8GB RAM gets allocated to the VM (requirement when doing PCI passthrough), when in reality is using less than 1GB, memory that can be used for other things in the node. Bottom line will USB Device give me the same performance as PCI? Not that it's super critical, because, my bottleneck is the 2.5Gbps network, because the VMs to be backed up are on the other 2 nodes.
Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to provide enough information about the scenario, thanks
