raid0 or striped disks

[jbates58]

Hello all

i am trying to make a striped raid on 2 disks in my server.

setup is
NVME in HOST with Proxmox installed onto it

2 x 120GB SSD drives that i am wanting to either stripe, RAID0 or jbod together and pass through to the VM's

but, for the life of me, i cant work out how to do it. i can add them both as a directory, or a VG individually, but just can not work out how to combine them as 1 striped drive.

please help.

cheers

 

[Stefan_R]

PVE doesn't support striped disks via the GUI by default, you have to create them on the command line.

For LVM you can use 'mdadm' to create a device /dev/mdX and then use and format that as LVM/LVM-thin via the GUI. [0] Alternatively, LVM supports striping itself, but that requires more effort to get working properly via our GUI.
For ZFS you have to create and use the pool on the command line (e.g. zpool create <name> sdX sdY, replace X/Y with your drive letters), then add the pool as a storage via Datacenter->Storage->Add->ZFS and select your new pool.

[0] https://www.digitalocean.com/commun...create-raid-arrays-with-mdadm-on-ubuntu-16-04

 

[jbates58]

ok, so i am looking to do 2 striped arrays.

array 1)
2 x intel 120GB ssd's
will be used for things like my WSUS storage and a few other VM's that wont need alot of storage for their specific tasks

array 2)
3 x 6TB WD Red's
see the story of how i got here down below
already have my data on them from my windows 10 server that i was running at home for data backups etc...



ok, so i came to proxmox as i had a system running windows 10 as my NAS, its located in my shed, away from my house. the drives were configured in STRIPED mode in windows, just using the inbuilt partition manager (yes, i understand all the risks of striped raid) the server is a 1 : 1 backup of my data striped array on my desktop, and i have another completely offsite system at a friends house that sync'd daily. so i feel that i have plenty of redundancy and the backups covered. having the drives as a stripe was only for speed, as having my data backed up as triplicate is redundant enough i think.

i wanted to experiment with PFsense, and some other things, so i concluded that proxmox would be the best fit for me, so, i went about installing it onto my server (on another drive, i still have the windows one working) and i created a PFsense VM, ant its humming along nicely. but my issue now is the windows one, i can get windows running nicely, but i cant get the disks to pass through. they are formatted in NTFS (i would speculate) so i am wanting to directly pass through the 3 RED drives to that VM, so i ca import the array, and then that will hum along as it used to.

but that dosen't seem to be the case, unless i have missed something. so, from what i can gather, i will have to format the drives and make a ZFS array with them? or is there another solution to my setup?

basically my end goal is to have the 3 x REDS pushed through to the Windows 10VM for my NAS just like it used to be. and if i can do that withough having to sync all the data back over, that would be peachy.

cheers

 

[Stefan_R]

The safe and easy route for what you're trying to achieve would definitely be ZFS. That would also give you all the benefits of ZFS, like data corruption detection (yes, even on RAID0; it can't repair any damage of course but it would be detected by checksumming). This is also the only way of sharing data on your array with multiple VMs, as in that case the hypervisor (PVE) needs to know about them (so for your two SSDs this (or the LVM way I described above) would certainly be your best bet).

If you really want to keep your Windows-stripes, you can try passing through all 3 RED drives directly to you VM [0]. I have no idea how Windows handles disk changes in striped arrays, as the drives will show up on a different location then when you set it up, so YMMV - but I'm sure there's a way arond that too, if you get creative...

[0] https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Physical_disk_to_kvm

 

[jbates58]

i shouls also mention that my server does NOT have ECC ram.

and i am possibly looking to replace the 3 x WD Reds with 2 x 8TB Ironwolfs, so how would a ZFS system work for that? the base OS i use for my data backup is Windows 10.does that work with ZFS?

i will admit, this is all new to me, and im trying to work my way through it with how i want it to end up, and trying to get it to work that way.

Jason

 

[Stefan_R]

i shouls also mention that my server does NOT have ECC ram.

The risk by not using ECC is substantially lower then not using redundant disks, which you say you're fine without.

In general ZFS works with any amount of disks, redundant or striped. Windows itself doesn't play with ZFS too nicely, however, if you create the pool on PVE and add a Windows VM with it's disk on the ZFS pool (and just use all available space for that one VM), Windows will simply pick it up as a regular drive to be formatted with NTFS and the host will take care of ZFS.