Separate PVE Boot Drive??

[Rick_W]

I have read a couple of posts commenting about using a seperate SSD drive for the PVE boot drive. In a homelab setup I currently have 2 SSD ZFS Raid1 drives for both PVE boot and Disk Image. Is a separate drive just for PVE boot and OS best practice? Would a drive for only PVE boot see the same level of writes as the Disk Image drive and need to be Enterprise?

Thanks for your advice.

 

[UdoB]

Is a separate drive just for PVE boot and OS best practice?

To separate "the OS" from "the data" is still best practice, yes! For PVE the OS should reside on a mirror, of course.

With the constraints of "Mini-PCs" I feel fine to just install PVE on two (or more) devices, in a ZFS mirror. The resulting single ZFS pool ("rpool") is good to use for all three: the OS plus files (Datasets) for containers plus ZVOLs for virtual block devices. It just works - and the assignment of the actual space is handled dynamically.

That said... I need to mention the problems with (too) cheap disks. It is highly recommended to use "Enterprise Class" devices with PLP. (For both speed and endurance.)

If that is a problem for you should know what ZFS gives you in exchange for this "problem": https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/f...y-a-few-disks-should-i-use-zfs-at-all.160037/

Have fun

 

[Rick_W]

UdoB,

Thanks for your response. I am using Enterprise Class drives in my current setup and happy to hear I don't need to spend a stupid amount of money for more drives.

I am an IT Systems Engineer by profession and home hobby. PVE is the most fun I've had since building my first home firewall many, many years ago.

Thanks.