proxmox 1.4 beta on flash drive

[garrettwp]

Now that Proxmox 1.4 beta is out and it now has the ability to manage and setup storage, can it be installed on a flash drive? The VM's would of course be installed on disk. The purpose of this would be to have the the OS on the flash drive and the VM's and so forth on disk and it would allow me to free up a disk tray for an additional disk.

- Garrett

 

[tom]

Now that Proxmox 1.4 beta is out and it now has the ability to manage and setup storage, can it be installed on a flash drive? The VM's would of course be installed on disk. The purpose of this would be to have the the OS on the flash drive and the VM's and so forth on disk and it would allow me to free up a disk tray for an additional disk.

- Garrett

OpenVZ still needs local storage. But depending on your motherboard bios you should be able to install it on a flash. usb sticks are quite slow, flash on sata is much faster but only 2 gb available today. or what do you plan? I assume anything smaller than 16 GB will not work, maybe also this is to small.

 

[garrettwp]

I only run KVM virtual machines. These will reside on another disk using the new storage pool feature in 1.4. The OS portion would be stored on the flash drive. The only thing I can think of that would need good io performance would be for the VM's and these would be stored on other disks. The only thing that would really get written to the flash drive would be the logs and other minor os stuff. I would think with the above mentioned setup the performance would not be noticeable. Would you agree/disagree? Would like to get a developers perspective.

- Garrett

 

[garrettwp]

I forgot to ask, is it possible to have the install format the drive using ext2 or ext3 with out journaling?

- Garrett

 

[tom]

I forgot to ask, is it possible to have the install format the drive using ext2 or ext3 with out journaling?

- Garrett

not if you use the default installer. again, what flash media do you plan to use?

 

[garrettwp]

I was planning on using a normal flash drive. e.g. 16GB OCZ Diesel drive. Actually I spent a few hours yesterday giving this idea a try. The outcome was not so good. This is not the fault of the proxmox software. The issue I was having was that my system would see the usb drive and boot the custom proxmox install, but would mix up the disk locations. For example, I would have 4 1TB disks installed with dev paths of /dev/sd[a-d]. When booting up the usb drive with proxmox, the root partition would mount with /dev/sda and the first hard disk would be assigned /dev/sda. This is very odd as it would not mount the first hard disk as it was already mounted and being used by the root partition of the usb drive. The usb drive needed to be booted with /dev/sde in the grub menu, but would then be assigned /dev/sda after mounting the root partition and proceed to load the OS. I did not have time to figure out a work around. So I decided to hold off and reboot the system back with the hard disk.

- Garrett

 

[tom]

I was planning on using a normal flash drive. e.g. 16GB OCZ Diesel drive. Actually I spent a few hours yesterday giving this idea a try. The outcome was not so good. This is not the fault of the proxmox software. The issue I was having was that my system would see the usb drive and boot the custom proxmox install, but would mix up the disk locations. For example, I would have 4 1TB disks installed with dev paths of /dev/sd[a-d]. When booting up the usb drive with proxmox, the root partition would mount with /dev/sda and the first hard disk would be assigned /dev/sda. This is very odd as it would not mount the first hard disk as it was already mounted and being used by the root partition of the usb drive. The usb drive needed to be booted with /dev/sde in the grub menu, but would then be assigned /dev/sda after mounting the root partition and proceed to load the OS. I did not have time to figure out a work around. So I decided to hold off and reboot the system back with the hard disk.

- Garrett

I would be interested in fixing this but its not at high priority here as we got a lot of other more important features.

USB: usb drives are quite limited in speed. recently I installed a custom firewall on this but its only available with 2 gb in the moment. but looks promising, cheap and fast and I assume the issue you described does not appear as this is shown as a normal sata disk to the os.

 

[tom]

I was planning on using a normal flash drive. e.g. 16GB OCZ Diesel drive. Actually I spent a few hours yesterday giving this idea a try. The outcome was not so good. This is not the fault of the proxmox software. The issue I was having was that my system would see the usb drive and boot the custom proxmox install, but would mix up the disk locations. For example, I would have 4 1TB disks installed with dev paths of /dev/sd[a-d]. When booting up the usb drive with proxmox, the root partition would mount with /dev/sda and the first hard disk would be assigned /dev/sda. This is very odd as it would not mount the first hard disk as it was already mounted and being used by the root partition of the usb drive. The usb drive needed to be booted with /dev/sde in the grub menu, but would then be assigned /dev/sda after mounting the root partition and proceed to load the OS. I did not have time to figure out a work around. So I decided to hold off and reboot the system back with the hard disk.

- Garrett

why not just use a SATA SSD disk instead of USB flash?

 

[Omny_Devi]

there is an app called unetbootin. i would look into that. since using that program, i rarely burn any OS to cd anymore.

 

[tom]

there is an app called unetbootin. i would look into that. since using that program, i rarely burn any OS to cd anymore.

will not work with our ISO.

 

[Omny_Devi]

ah, just now saw the 1.4beta, my apologies.

 

[garrettwp]

Tom,

Thanks for the help. Do not worry about it. I would prefer to have new/better features than to worry about this. I just had an idea and wanted to see if it would work out well. Other then the hard drive mapping issues, it did seem to work well. Yes it is a little slow when writing large, a lot of data to the usb drive, but most of any disk io would be done on the other disks. The usb drive would just host the OS and nothing more.

The purpose of this test was to try and free up another sata port for additional disk. I have not formated the usb drive and will maybe play with it more at a later time. I think this would be a neat setup if you plan on using kvm, as openvz from what I understand is not supported in the new storage feature.

- Garrett

I would be interested in fixing this but its not at high priority here as we got a lot of other more important features.

USB: usb drives are quite limited in speed. recently I installed a custom firewall on this but its only available with 2 gb in the moment. but looks promising, cheap and fast and I assume the issue you described does not appear as this is shown as a normal sata disk to the os.