SD card deployment

[tcabernoch]

I'm converting an old ESXi VSAN cluster to CEPH.

ESXi ran on a Dell IDSM, which is a RAID 1 pair of SD cards in a device to make it look like 1 card.

I want all the SSD disks I can use for CEPH, so I want to deploy PVE on the old SDs.
I did set up the cluster on the SD cards once. it worked.
- Deploy on LVM, not ZFS, for fewer disk writes.
- LVM rocket surgery to remove the swap and data volume and reallocate the space to root.

That was functional. I burned it down because I was testing other things, but I can go back to it just by switching the boot disk.

Question is, is this a good idea?
Anybody have experience running PVE on LVM formatted SD cards like ESXi? (Definitely not ZFS.)
How did that go?

 

[BD-Nets]

Depends on the used SD-Cards. VMware uses the card only as boot image provider and runs fully from RAM.
With VMware Version 7.0.0. till 7.0.2 there was an issue (scatchpad area assigned to SD-Card) which quickly (2-3 months) destroyed SD-Cards.
Debian/Proxmox was not written with SD-Card in mind (unlike Debian/Raspbian) so yourd SD-Card might die soon, too.

 

[Kingneutron]

It's probably not a good idea. SD cards are OK if you want to boot a recovery environment, but not if you're running a server 24/7.

You can do things to mitigate writes like log2ram, sending syslog to a central instance, noatime, etc... but realistically Proxmox is not ESXI. It doesn't run the same way.

You'd be better off installing pve to an external SSD like samsung T7. Your I/O will definitely be faster than SD. You can specify the swap size, etc during install by using the advanced options when it asks what disk(s) to install to.

 

[tcabernoch]

Thanks guys. I appreciate the potential workaround suggestions.
I had already come to the conclusion that I'm gonna lose two capacity drives just to the OS.
You've confirmed.

What's up Neutron? It's been a minute. I've been very busy. Too busy to play here. Oh, and I found Lemmy to fill my time. :]