Server Motherboard compatibility - SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SLH-F-O uATX

[TechInAZ]

I have currently been testing ProxMox 3.x on an mini ITX board with a Celeron J1900. I'm running one Untangle VM and two CentOS 7 VMs. It's working much better than I would have thought.

Now that I have done the testing and am more familiar with ProxMox I am going to be setting up two new identical ProxMox 4 servers for my client. They will be single socket 1150 Xeon servers. This is the hardware:
SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SLH-F-O uATX Server Motherboard LGA 1150 Intel C226 DDR3 1600
Intel Xeon E3-1241 v3 Haswell 3.5 GHz 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1150 80W
Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
(quantity=2) TOSHIBA P300 HDWD120XZSTA 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
(The drives will be setup as a RAID 1 using the onboard sata raid controller)

The mail purpose of the servers will be for the linux based email server Atmail (retail version). One server will be at the main location and one at an offsite location as a type of hot backup for Atmail. Basically a backup of the ProxMox VM will be sent to the remote location either daily or weekly. (Sending of the backup is only temporary until the Atmail has their server mirroring technology finished next year.)

There will probably be no more than 2 VM's on each ProxMox server. So my question would be: "Is this hardware/motherboard setup compatible with ProxMox?" Is it a good compatibility or is it a "should work" kind of compatibility?

I currently have a ticket into Atmail about whether their software is compatible with ProxMox or if it can even be run as a VM.

 

[TechInAZ]

It's been so long since I have done a clean install for Atmail, for some reason I was thinking it was a custom linux install but it will be running on a CentOS 7 VM in ProxMox.

 

[RobFantini]

We've used Supermicro motherboards for a long time. Over 10 years. There has never been an issue running Debian.

For your setup consider using zfs raid-1 for file system and pve-zsync to backup the vm's remotely. Do the 1-st pve-zsync with the backup system on site, then try pve-zsync with the backup system off site . depending on bandwidth and how much data changes this should work.

 

[TechInAZ]

I have never used zfs raid. I did a little googling, there is quite a bit of info. If you could give a very brief overview of the advantages of using it over the onboard SATA raid. Also, this is installed on ProxMox and not on the VM correct? I'm still a bit new to VM environments with RAID.

 

[RobFantini]

I have never used zfs raid. I did a little googling, there is quite a bit of info. If you could give a very brief overview of the advantages of using it over the onboard SATA raid. Also, this is installed on ProxMox and not on the VM correct? I'm still a bit new to VM environments with RAID.

zfs is built in to pve as of version 4.
during install you can choose to use zfs raid 1.

I've more questions on your mail system. How many active users? About how many emails per hour/day ? And how much storage is used? I ask because there may be more needed to set up zfs - like a cache or log ssd drive.

for more info on zfs see
http://wiki.illumos.org/download/attachments/1146951/zfs_last.pdf
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/zfs.html
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/ZFS

With zfs you can take the 2 drives out of the system , and put in to another motherboard with a different chipset . I am not sure you can do so with all on board sata.

I had a drive zfs system for home theater at home. It survived 3 different operating systems and a few hardware upgraded. zfs is hard to kill. I've moved zfs from 3ware raid card to a ibm non raid card.

 

[TechInAZ]

It's a low bandwidth mail server only about 25 to 50 users. The redundancy is the most critical part.

 

[cesarpk]

(The drives will be setup as a RAID 1 using the onboard sata raid controller)

With PVE 3.x, i know that fake RAID (also know it as host o soft RAID) isn't supported in the majority of the cases, but with PVE 4.x, that has a kernel that is based in the kernel of Ubuntu server, I am not be sure, maybe some one can dispel this doubt, that i will be very grateful.

Best regards
Cesar

 

[RobFantini]

I'd try zfs raid-1 without the added ssd for cache. If needed that can be added later.

 

[cesarpk]

I'd try zfs raid-1 without the added ssd for cache. If needed that can be added later.

I know that ZFS is a vampire consuming RAM, but if your kernel support the fake RAID, the advantage that you will gain is that will have much free RAM.

Moreover, ZFS is fantastic and super sure of using (because he does several verifications and repairs in hot).