Recommended strategy for current drives

[justgump77]

Hello,
New to the Proxmox world and working on building a home server / NAS. I'm hoping I can get some feedback on my planned drive layout before I start install on my new build. The main questions I have are:

• Is it advisable to run 2 x 500GB SSD (SATA3) drives in a mirrored pair for PVE OS install and VM/container storage? Any issues with doing this?
• Any major issues or strong recommendations against any of the planned setup below (hardware already purchased)?

Hardware:

• CPU = Intel Core i3-10100 (w/ Arctic Alpine 12 CO cooler)
• Motherboard = Asus Prime B460-M-A
• RAM = 2 x 4GB (8GB) GSkill Ripjaws DDR4-2400
• PSU = Seasonic S12iii 500 (500w)
• Case = Fractal Design Node 804
• SSD = 2 x 500GB SSD (WD Blue and Kingston)
• HDD's = 3 x 4TB WD Red (12tb total)
• USB drives = 2 x 16GB Sandisk Cruzer Fit (USB 2.0)
• UPS = APC 1000va/600w

Primary intended services/uses:

• OMV VM
  • Pass through 3 x 4TB drives to OMV VM
  • UnionFS and SnapRaid to manage drives
  • Serve up NFS and SMB shares
• Media VM (Likely Debian)
  • Docker/Portainer
  • Docker container for Plex (live TV DVR)
• "Cloud" VM (likely Debian)
  • Docker/Portainer
  • NextCloud (Data stored on OMV VM share)
  • Backup service for gaming PC

3 VM's total, maybe a 4th as a test server. I know I can do pretty much everything from the OMV VM (Or OMV baremetal for that matter), but I like the idea of virtualizing 3 separate VM's for 3 different purposes to keep things separate.

 

[Stefan_R]

Is it advisable to run 2 x 500GB SSD (SATA3) drives in a mirrored pair for PVE OS install and VM/container storage? Any issues with doing this?

No issues in general. If you use ZFS you can even make use of thin-provisioning between PVE and your VMs/containers. You can set this up directly in the PVE installer.

Any major issues or strong recommendations against any of the planned setup below (hardware already purchased)?

Always depends a lot on your specific use cases, but on first glance it looks okay for a home NAS setup... though I'm a bit confused why you listed the 2 USB drives?

 

[justgump77]

No issues in general. If you use ZFS you can even make use of thin-provisioning between PVE and your VMs/containers. You can set this up directly in the PVE installer.


Always depends a lot on your specific use cases, but on first glance it looks okay for a home NAS setup... though I'm a bit confused why you listed the 2 USB drives?

Thanks for the response! I do plan on using ZFS for the 2 SSDs during the install.

I'm currently planning on 3 VMS total. One will be an OMV5 server to serve core NAS functionality. One VM will be Debian that hosts some services the will be Internet accessible (NextCloud, Cloud Controller, Nginx proxy manager or traefik). The 3rd VM will host my media services, primarily PLEX, and will only be accessible via LAN. Services will run in Docker Containers on their respective VMs. Thinking I may need to bump up to maybe 16gb of RAM at least, but I'll see how 8 goes initially.

This was initially going to be an UNraid build, which is why the USB drives were listed. Those can be ignored now since I'm leaning heavily toward PVE instead.