Setup recommendation

[alfwro]

Hi,
I am in a process of testing Proxmox for my home lab - I have Intel NUC with 1 TB SSD drive installed inside and NFS storage.
I am bit struggling to pick the right setup for - I am currently running esxi so I am booting from a USB stick and my SSD drive is simply used as a storage
I understand that with Proxmox it will have to be installed on the SSD drive - that is fine but this raises questions like how do I partition the drive?

I was thinking setting up proxmox on 30GB ext4 partition and then once that is installed creating ZFS partition from the rest of of the SSD drive for VM storage?
Is that the right way to do this?
of should I not bother with that and just install proxmox on zfs right from the start and let it manage the partitioning?
Thanks

 

[oguz]

hi,

I understand that with Proxmox it will have to be installed on the SSD drive - that is fine but this raises questions like how do I partition the drive?

hmm, if you want to boot from usb you can search the forum (some people have done it), but we don't recommend/support that setup

for partitioning the ssd itself, you'll need to think about your use-case. PVE installer will automatically create a LVM-thin storage (the size of the partitions can be configured inside the installer).
you could also use ZFS like you mentioned. but beware that ZFS can use quite a bit of RAM, so with your intel NUC it might not work as well as you hope. check our wiki pages for information [0] [1], it can help you decide.

Is that the right way to do this?

that depends

of should I not bother with that and just install proxmox on zfs right from the start and let it manage the partitioning?

if you want to go the custom partitioning route (e.g. 30G ext4 + ZFS with the rest) then you probably need to install debian bullseye first and add the PVE repositories on top [2]

hope this helps!

[0]: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/ZFS_on_Linux
[1]: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage
[2]:https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_11_Bullseye

 

[alfwro]

My only reason for using thinking about using ZFS is that my understanding is that this is the only way to thin provision VMs?

 

[oguz]

My only reason for using thinking about using ZFS is that my understanding is that this is the only way to thin provision VMs?

nope, you can also use LVM-thin (check the storage link)

 

[alfwro]

perfect thanks