Should i install proxmox on my 4TB SSD RAID 5 setup ?

[moda20]

I am moving my homelab from docker containers to proxmox VE VMs. my motivation is to be able to backup whole folders / images more easily and not have 5 or 6 different postgres containers at the same time. A secondary goal would be to learn mopre about virtualization (Okey knowledge).

My goal is to have a stable drive to use. i had prior issues with bad disks failing and breaking my filesystem. i am going to get 3 2TB SSDs and put them in RAID 5 with 4Tb of usable space.

I want to know Hoiw can i install it on the RAID setup and if the RAID config is created by the installer or should i have it ready somehow.
the second question is shoudl i do the isntall on the full drive ? knowing that i don't have any other SSDs and my HDDs are nor fast enough to be used for other than bulk storage and maybe backups and temporary downloaded files.

Thanks in advance.

 

[d.oishi]

If you are using a real hardware RAID controller and you want to use hardware RAID, then the RAID5 array should be configured in the RAID controller firmware first. During the Proxmox installation, that array should appear as a single logical disk.

In that case, I would not put ZFS on top of the hardware RAID array. Just install Proxmox on the logical disk using the normal non-ZFS installer option, for example ext4/xfs with LVM-thin.

If you are not using a hardware RAID controller, or if your controller can expose the disks individually, for example in JBOD/HBA/IT mode, then you can let the Proxmox installer create a ZFS RAIDZ-1 pool using the three SSDs.

Since you only have three SSDs, it is fine to use all three of them for the Proxmox installation and VM storage in the same ZFS pool. The installer will handle the system and VM storage layout on that pool.

However, RAIDZ-1 can tolerate one disk failure.

This manual section may also help:
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#installation_installer