Hey all. I have a configuration question for my home lab setup. Currently I have a 12-bay Dell PowerEdge r540 with 12 x 3.5" drive bays. I would like to maximize my storage on that server and use it as a shared ZFS pool across the network. The servers will have their own network away from the data network and it will be isolated to a 10GB switch with SFP+ and 10GbE.
My goal is to utilize the R540 with it's single Xeon Silver cpu and 192gb of RAM without having to upgrade it. I have acquired a R730 and 2 x R640's all with 256GB of RAM. I have limited SSD/HDD resources for those so if I could have them being nodes using the shared pool on the R540, that seems to be best. That way I could put more $$ into getting greater capacity drives for the R540 that I can continue to upgrade over time vs trying to have limited capacity 2.5" drives.
Will the 10GB network speeds be sufficient for this setup? I don't have iSCSI or FibreChannel so I'm limited to 10GB ethernet at the moment.
Last question. Would it be best to use dual 256GB SD flash cards in a mirrored configuration for installation of the ProxMox OS on each of those nodes? If so, would I need any 2.5" drives at all installed in them? Or is it best to use no SD flash card media, but use say a mirrored SSD setup on each? Either way, is it practical to keep the VM's stored on the R540 across the network or does ProxMox require (or just for generally faster speeds) the VM's installed locally with any data on the R540 being something like an NFS share?
Just looking for optimal configuration as well as taking advanced learning to apply to jobs and other situations later.
Thanks!
My goal is to utilize the R540 with it's single Xeon Silver cpu and 192gb of RAM without having to upgrade it. I have acquired a R730 and 2 x R640's all with 256GB of RAM. I have limited SSD/HDD resources for those so if I could have them being nodes using the shared pool on the R540, that seems to be best. That way I could put more $$ into getting greater capacity drives for the R540 that I can continue to upgrade over time vs trying to have limited capacity 2.5" drives.
Will the 10GB network speeds be sufficient for this setup? I don't have iSCSI or FibreChannel so I'm limited to 10GB ethernet at the moment.
Last question. Would it be best to use dual 256GB SD flash cards in a mirrored configuration for installation of the ProxMox OS on each of those nodes? If so, would I need any 2.5" drives at all installed in them? Or is it best to use no SD flash card media, but use say a mirrored SSD setup on each? Either way, is it practical to keep the VM's stored on the R540 across the network or does ProxMox require (or just for generally faster speeds) the VM's installed locally with any data on the R540 being something like an NFS share?
Just looking for optimal configuration as well as taking advanced learning to apply to jobs and other situations later.
Thanks!