Should I install Proxmox on SSD or HDD?
- Thread starter galvatec
- Start date
It doesn't really matter. PVE should work fine on both and you won't see a benefit of running it of faster SSDs. Really depends on how you are planning to use the drives. If you are planning to use the HDDs for heavy loads like backups, VM storage or databases where the IOPS performance of the HDDs might be bottlenecking so I would install PVE to the SSDs. If the HDDs will always be idleing I would install PVE to the HDDs so you got more space for VMs on the SSDs. Running VMs of HDDs will problably slow down the whole system because of the IO wait, so I would highly recommend to only use the HDDs as a cold storage and store all VMs on those SSDs.
Last edited:
Dunuin is correct, the choice is in your hands and depends on your workload.
Personally, and without knowing your circumstances, I would mirror the SSDs using ZFS during installation of PVE onto the SSDs. Your installation will create two partitions, one of which is block based for VMs. You can set the max OS size during installation, something like 48GB or 64GB works for most cases. Limiting your swap may also be wise to reduce wear on your SSDs. As noted in other posts, for systems without much memory, consider limiting the ZFS arc cache (this will lead to a performance penalty but in my experience on SSDs you will not notice it compared to running out of memory).
Your HDDs can later be setup as a mirror and either be used for secondary VM disks (for large data/content) or backups.
There isn't a wrong way of doing this, but a mirror for both is my recommendation to increase your data resiliency. Also, be sure to check the disk wearout in the disks menu within your PVE node to monitor when your SSDs need replacing.
Cheers,
Tmanok
Personally, and without knowing your circumstances, I would mirror the SSDs using ZFS during installation of PVE onto the SSDs. Your installation will create two partitions, one of which is block based for VMs. You can set the max OS size during installation, something like 48GB or 64GB works for most cases. Limiting your swap may also be wise to reduce wear on your SSDs. As noted in other posts, for systems without much memory, consider limiting the ZFS arc cache (this will lead to a performance penalty but in my experience on SSDs you will not notice it compared to running out of memory).
Your HDDs can later be setup as a mirror and either be used for secondary VM disks (for large data/content) or backups.
There isn't a wrong way of doing this, but a mirror for both is my recommendation to increase your data resiliency. Also, be sure to check the disk wearout in the disks menu within your PVE node to monitor when your SSDs need replacing.
Cheers,
Tmanok
Thanks a lot for the info, but due to limited time I created a ZFS RAID1 with the SSDs to install proxmox and then I created a ZFS RAID1 with the HDDs, then I created a Windows 10 VM and allocated the ZFS HDD on it with a total of 3TB leaving 1TB of the HDD that is 4TB is it possible for me to create a directory and use this remaining 1TB for Backups?
Last edited:
You could create a dataset using the
zfs create YourPool/backups command in CLI, then go to "Datacenter -> Storage -> Add -> Directory" and add the mountpoint of that dataset as a "directory" storage. Make sure to select "vzdump" as the content type for that directory storage and use pvesm set YourStorageID --is_mountpoint yes afterwards. Then you can use that HDD pool for backups too.But keep in mind that this would be useless for backups of your Win VM as backups and guests shouldn't be stored on the same pool, so you don'T loose both at the same time when you loose your pool.
Last edited: