Proxmon on HP Proliant DL380 G9

[wiredworm]

Hi there,

I've been gifted an old DL380 G9 by my employer. It was previously part of a storage setup but they migrated to a flash-based IBM setup last year which meant this was surplus to requirements.

It's a pretty powerful box with a couple of quad-core Xeon CPU's installed, 128GB of RAM and 24 SAS drives (4 SSD's if I remember rightly, and the rest are spinning disks). It's also got a Smart Array controller fitted.

So, my question is - will this work with Proxmox and if so is there a 'best' way to configure it?

Do I need to actually define arrays in the SA controller or is it possible to map the physical disks directly to VM's defined in Proxmox?

Grateful for any pointers people can give. Proxmox is totally new to me so i'm very keen to learn more about it.

Thanks

Pete

 

[fireon]

Yes, we have a lot of this HP Servers running fine with Proxmox. I think the best way is to build two raids. One for SSD's an one for HDD's. It is highly recommended to use Raid10 for virtualization. If you have already installed pve on the SSD's, build a new storage with LVM-Thin from the webgui for your HDD pool. After that ready to use Don forget to click sometimes if you need help - directly on the "help button" in the webgui @the place you are.

 

[wiredworm]

Yes, we have a lot of this HP Servers running fine with Proxmox. I think the best way is to build two raids. One for SSD's an one for HDD's. It is highly recommended to use Raid10 for virtualization. If you have already installed pve on the SSD's, build a new storage with LVM-Thin from the webgui for your HDD pool. After that ready to use Don forget to click sometimes if you need help - directly on the "help button" in the webgui @the place you are.

Thanks That is how I have configured the disks.

I wasn't sure what all of the different storage types were, so thanks for confirming that I should use LVM-Thin. I presume the -Thin part means they are thin provisioned so they only take up space once you start to fill them with data?

The spinning disks at RAID 10 will equate to about 20TB in space. Is there any recommendations on how I should break that up? The LVM-Thin volumes I make will hold the files that represent the virtual disks I guess? So if I plan to make 2TB volumes then I should make sure my LVM-Thin volumes are in multiples of 2TB I guess? Maybe one at 2TB and then 4 x 4TB?

 

[fireon]

I wasn't sure what all of the different storage types were, so thanks for confirming that I should use LVM-Thin. I presume the -Thin part means they are thin provisioned so they only take up space once you start to fill them with data?

Yes.

The spinning disks at RAID 10 will equate to about 20TB in space. Is there any recommendations on how I should break that up? The LVM-Thin volumes I make will hold the files that represent the virtual disks I guess? So if I plan to make 2TB volumes then I should make sure my LVM-Thin volumes are in multiples of 2TB I guess? Maybe one at 2TB and then 4 x 4TB?

Not shure about a limit, we did not have such big images running on lvm. For this we use Supermicro with ZFS. But normally it should be ok with GPT to use sizes bigger then 2TB.