Please Sanity Check My Upgrade Plan

CopeyJ

New Member
Jul 10, 2022
3
0
1
Hi,

Sorry, this is a bit of a long one… TLDR at end

I’ve been messing about with Proxmox since picking up an 8 slot R530 (2x E5-2630 v3 & 96GB of RAM) from eBay and would now like to reconfigure it to boost performance, take advantage of ZFS and explore Proxmox a bit deeper.

Existing:
Proxmox on a single 1.2TB SAS drive that also hosts the following VMs:
Linux
Windows 10
Xpenology (with 3x 1.2 TB SAS HDD passed through)
Linux Server (game servers)
Windows Server (game servers)
Roon Core (music server)

(There are also 2no. 240gb SSDs that I passed through just to test the process)

Planned:

Proxmox Boot – 2x Crucial MX500 240GB ZFS Mirror

My reasoning: I understand about the 30GB/Day of logs etc but even the 240GB models have 100TBW endurance, so I should be good for a fair while.

VMs/Storage – 3x or 4x Intel S4610 SSD (480 or 960GB) ZFZ Z1 Raid (maybe Z2 if I get 4 bigger drives)
My Reasoning: These drives seem to have good endurance and come up on eBay for a fair price with some reasonable life left in them.

Remaining SAS slots – Pass through 2x or 4x 1.2TB SAS HDD
Passed to Xpenology/DSM to make a small SHR BTFS array for DSM to use.

I’m tied to DSM to share a large collection of family photos. The interface and apps are family friendly, and they have been happily using it for many years - So I really don’t want to open that can of worms again!!
The data on these drives is snapshot, locally, then replicated, and snapshot, to a second Synology unit, Hyper backed up to a USB HDD and also synced to cloud storage (future might see an offsite Synology unit too) That said, I’m interested to see how well DSM can access/present data in the ZFS storage. If it works fine, I would be more comfortable investing in more enterprise SSD’s and/or expanding into the Proxmox clusters.


TLDR:
2x 240GB Consumer SSD (new) in ZFS mirror for Boot – The endurance concerns have been calmed.
3x 480GB Intel S4610 (used) in ZFS Z1 for VMs/Storage etc (4x with Z2 and 960GB is also possible)
Remaining SAS slots passed through to Xpenology VM for DSM apps and ease of use by family.



Any clangers/pitfalls in what I’m thinking, or recommendations to improve?


Many thanks for any comments.

J
 

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