Proxmox Newbie - Disk setup and other questions

[sfb911]

Hi all,

I could use some help here with my home lab setup for Proxmox. I'm new and still learning, but I'd like to get this right. GB

Lab box is:

Lenovo M90Q Tiny
64GB of RAM
1 x 2.5 inch 250GB SSD
2 x 1TB NVME Samsung 970's.



I did a couple of test installs and get the gist but I'd like to get this setup right before I start building out some VM's and all that.

Ideally, what I'd like to do:

Single disk ZFS on the 250 GB HD for proxmox OS and ISO storage
Mirror the 2 x NVME drives for VM's

My question is whats the best way to accomplish this? More specifically:

I see the installer created two storage nodes, local and local-zfs, and local shows ISO's but local-zfs does not? Does this make sense or should it be changed?

Once I mirror the NVME drives and tweak ZFS (I played with some stuff I found to test)...do I need to do anything beyond making sure Proxmox can see them to set it to default to using this for VM storage?

Given this system will likely run 3 systems i consider critical to my lab...(2 pi hole servers on ubuntu server and a mint desktop) and then probably 3-4 more transitory VM's that I use for testing...couple firewalls and a host or two. What would be the recommended setup in terms of limiting memory for ZFS?

I'll be backing up the 'critical servers' to my synology nas using CIFS...but can anyone point me at resources for backing up the critical OS files for proxmox in the single 2.5 SSD dies? Downtime isn't really an issue as I have a 3rd DNS server running on a RasberryPI that can handle my network if the proxmox system goes down...I'd just like to be able to restore the config and hopefully those 3 VM's without too much work in the event of a failure.

Also - what if any use case would there be for LVM in this environment?

No need to provide specific command or steps. I'm fairly technical I just don't know proxmox very well yet. So feel free to hit me with links / articles and I can educate myself...specific advice is obviously welcome but not required beyond RTFM

 

[Dunuin]

I see the installer created two storage nodes, local and local-zfs, and local shows ISO's but local-zfs does not? Does this make sense or should it be changed?

"local-zfs" is block-level storage so no support for files, "local" is filesystem-level storage.

Once I mirror the NVME drives and tweak ZFS (I played with some stuff I found to test)...do I need to do anything beyond making sure Proxmox can see them to set it to default to using this for VM storage?

VM storage would be default. And defauls should be fine for a mirror. But keep in mind that ZFS should be used with enterprise/datacenter grade SSDs that got decent DWPD/TBW and power-loss protection. So don't expect great life expectation or performance with those EVOs, as they lack both.

What would be the recommended setup in terms of limiting memory for ZFS?

ZFS will use UP TO 50% of your hosts RAM. So 32GB by default. But it will free up its ARC in case the hosts needs more RAM, so you usually don't need to limit the ARC, unless you got some workloads that needs more RAM really fast where ZFS can't keep up dropping caches in time. But if you really want to limit the ARC, something like 4-8GB RAM should be fine.

but can anyone point me at resources for backing up the critical OS files for proxmox in the single 2.5 SSD dies?

Most important would be the /etc/pve folder. But I would backup the whole /etc folder as well as /root and /home.

Also - what if any use case would there be for LVM in this environment?

LVM won't do anything that ZFS couldn't do, except for having less overhead. so not needed when using ZFS.