Question regarding current setup and looking for suggestions

[sektor]

I am currently running proxmox 4.4 that was installed over debian wheezy as I wanted to utilize a raid. I setup a raid 1 of my 2 1TB HDD and a raid 0 of my 2 120 GB SSD's that I use for my ISO storage, logging, and cache.

I have read that ZFS is memory intensive and I currently have 20GB of physical memory, I was thinking of reloading my system with the latest version of Proxmox and was wondering if I should stick with my current mdadm setup or utilize ZFS raid.

I know I can upgrade my existing setup, but I have always been one to do a fresh install every once in a while.

 

[WhiteStarEOF]

Set zfs_arc_min to ~4GB, and zfs_arc_max to ~8GB. Adjust the min/max as necessary. If you find you're pulling data from disks more often than you'd like, raise the min. If you find you haven't had a disk performance problem in some time, try dropping a gig off of max and see if your VM still perform well.

20GB may be a bit slim, depending on how many VMs you want to fire up. But make use of KSM, ballooning, and aggressively "right sizing" your VMs' memory allocation, and you may have a fantastic time with ZFS. I generally deploy systems with 32GB of memory, with 10GB dedicated to the ZFS ARC.

 

[sektor]

Well my machine is just a budget machine for personal use, thus the low resources it's what I was able to get at the time.

I typically run 3 to 4 vm's about 4 to 8gb of memory each allocated and I believe I average about 50% memory usage according to the console, if I remember correctly I would have to login and look which I can do a little bit later.

 

[sektor]

So I have 4GB of memory set aside for a couple of vm's my pfsense vm is at 6gb, but I believe I can scale that back and the only reason why I set it like that is I am seeing high usage on the proxmox console, but on the pfsense side I am not seeing that high usage. So the above average usage of about 50% will most likely be because the VM is reporting high usage.

I'm basically trying to redo my setup as optimally as I can with what I have for right now. I may upgrade the memory or other hardware down the road.

Well my machine is just a budget machine for personal use, thus the low resources it's what I was able to get at the time.

I typically run 3 to 4 vm's about 4 to 8gb of memory each allocated and I believe I average about 50% memory usage according to the console, if I remember correctly I would have to login and look which I can do a little bit later.