Proxmox Storage Configuration

[tgates]

I have a couple Dell Poweredge R240 servers and I want to install Proxmox on these. Each currently has a Dell 960 GB balanced read/write Enterprise SSD. There are 3 free 3.5" drive bays - 4 total per server.

I can buy a bunch of 3TB enterprise drives for cheap and create a ZFS pool with 1 drive redundancy, but I've heard the VMs require lots of IOPs and I'll experience slowdowns. My other option would be to install Proxmox VE on the 1 SSD and create a ZFS pool on the 3 other HDDs for the VMs, but then I lose the host if the SSD dies.

What should I do with 4 drive bays on the cheap? Open to suggestions (These servers also have an internal USB 3.0 port)

 

[Robkd4]

Hi tgates,

do you have an PERC H330/730P Raid Controller or the HBA 330 Controller? ZFS needs an HBA Controller to work no Raid Controller.

IOPS depends on your need´s.

There are some guides to flash the H330 IT Mode

cheers

 

[tgates]

Hi tgates,

do you have an PERC H330/730P Raid Controller or the HBA 330 Controller? ZFS needs an HBA Controller to work no Raid Controller.

IOPS depends on your need´s.

There are some guides to flash the H330 IT Mode

cheers

They do have PERC controllers, but they are already in HBA mode, basically JBOD

 

[niteshadow]

For the boot drive you should look into adding a BOSS-S1 card with compatible 2 x M.2 sata drives. That frees up the bays.
For the data (4 bays), assuming HBA, I would use 4 drives in 2 mirror vdevs. With hardware raid controller this would be RAID10.
If you want to boot off existing disk for host (backup the configs, you can recover, or add another drive for mirror). I would then add 2 drives in mirror (RAID1 for hardware raid).

SSD is better than spinning rust. But depending on use case you can use hard drives.
At this scale you probably will not notice any difference. What's the use case anyway ? Is this for production or homelab ?