Right size for proxmox ssd

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zebisnaga

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Feb 3, 2023
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Not sure if this is the right place to place my doubt but...
I am planing on moving from ESXi to Proxmox but right now I have ESXi on a usb stick and I know thats not ideal for Proxmox.
I will have 2 SSDs to use on VMs but I want to install Proxmox SO in a small SSD that has only proxmox in it.
What should be the minimum size of this SSD for Proxmox?

Thanks
 
zebisnaga said:
Not sure if this is the right place to place my doubt but...
I am planing on moving from ESXi to Proxmox but right now I have ESXi on a usb stick and I know thats not ideal for Proxmox.
I will have 2 SSDs to use on VMs but I want to install Proxmox SO in a small SSD that has only proxmox in it.
What should be the minimum size of this SSD for Proxmox?

Thanks
Click to expand...
Depends. For PVE itself 16 to 32GB are totally fine. But you might want more in case you aren't adding other disks that could store ISOs, LXC templates or backups or if you want to add more packages.
 
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zebisnaga said:
I will have 2 SSDs to use on VMs but I want to install Proxmox SO in a small SSD that has only proxmox in it.
Click to expand...
A single SSD for PVE is a single point of failure. If that one is a cheap consumer SSD it is a no-go (for me) as the complete system and all VMs will not be available in the case that one fails...

We do not know the specs of your system, but I would install PVE as ZFS mirror on those 2 SSD. The result is
  • redundancy = one disk may fail without data loss
  • the system is bootable from "the other" SSD, when (not: if) one of it fails
  • you get all the goodies of ZFS
PVE uses "the boot disk" to store the OS and it can utilize this very same disks to also store Containers and VMs (and other stuff like ISOs). This is different from some other Hypervisors where OS and VM-Datastores must be on separate storages.

Example in my Homelab: I have a MinisForum/HM80 with two SSD and an actually installed NVMe. I installed PVE as described on those SSD. My NVMe is not used at all as I hesitate to use it without redundancy. (And the SSDs are fast enough, a Cache on NVMe makes no sense for me.)

Just my 2 €¢...
 
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UdoB said:
A single SSD for PVE is a single point of failure. If that one is a cheap consumer SSD it is a no-go (for me) as the complete system and all VMs will not be available in the case that one fails...

We do not know the specs of your system, but I would install PVE as ZFS mirror on those 2 SSD. The result is
  • redundancy = one disk may fail without data loss
  • the system is bootable from "the other" SSD, when (not: if) one of it fails
  • you get all the goodies of ZFS
PVE uses "the boot disk" to store the OS and it can utilize this very same disks to also store Containers and VMs (and other stuff like ISOs). This is different from some other Hypervisors where OS and VM-Datastores must be on separate storages.

Example in my Homelab: I have a MinisForum/HM80 with two SSD and an actually installed NVMe. I installed PVE as described on those SSD. My NVMe is not used at all as I hesitate to use it without redundancy. (And the SSDs are fast enough, a Cache on NVMe makes no sense for me.)

Just my 2 €¢...
Click to expand...
Thanks for that
So using 2 16GBs ssds as ZFS Mirror and 2 more ssds to store isos and vms would be fine?
I have 2 XEONS and 24 GB RAM
 
zebisnaga said:
So using 2 16GBs ssds as ZFS Mirror and 2 more ssds to store isos and vms would be fine?
Click to expand...
Yes, sounds good.
zebisnaga said:
I have 2 XEONS and 24 GB RAM
Click to expand...
You might want to search for "zfs arc limiting" to reduce default ram usage of being 50%/12GiB down to something like 4 or 6 GiB.
 
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UdoB said:
A single SSD for PVE is a single point of failure. If that one is a cheap consumer SSD it is a no-go (for me) as the complete system and all VMs will not be available in the case that one fails...

We do not know the specs of your system, but I would install PVE as ZFS mirror on those 2 SSD. The result is
  • redundancy = one disk may fail without data loss
  • the system is bootable from "the other" SSD, when (not: if) one of it fails
  • you get all the goodies of ZFS
PVE uses "the boot disk" to store the OS and it can utilize this very same disks to also store Containers and VMs (and other stuff like ISOs). This is different from some other Hypervisors where OS and VM-Datastores must be on separate storages.

Example in my Homelab: I have a MinisForum/HM80 with two SSD and an actually installed NVMe. I installed PVE as described on those SSD. My NVMe is not used at all as I hesitate to use it without redundancy. (And the SSDs are fast enough, a Cache on NVMe makes no sense for me.)

Just my 2 €¢...
Click to expand...

Thank you so much for advise. I will use it in my first proxmox build.

However, do you know any guide that tells you exactly what to do when 1 drive fails in ZFS mirror OS PVE install? I can only find this experiment with some workaround from 2020 https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/replacing-a-disk-in-a-proxmox-install-two-disk-zfs-mirror.68541/

It would be awesome to have clear instructions on what exactly to replace a failed drive in PVE OS ZFS mirror, make sure the system accepted the new drive and ZFS mirror functions as expected.
 
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