Simple cluster questions - drive layout, file system. Opinions wanted.

autumnwalker

Member
Sep 30, 2019
20
2
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I have come into some HP DL380 G8's and I was originally thinking about deploying them in my homelab as a three node Proxmox + Ceph hyper converged environment. Then I got into a rabbit hole of research on Ceph and also realized the impact to my power bill of running all of these servers 24x7. For each of my new nodes I will have to buy new disks (so the is a financial consideration to however I deploy it).

I currently run a two node environment using LVM for the Proxmox boot disk and other physical disks running ZFS for VMs. All ISOs are on NAS (would not use for shared VM storage). I'm thinking about just deploying the same with the HPs to replace my older machines. I don't really need HA, but I like to be able to migrate between two nodes to minimize downtime when I'm updating Proxmox or working on hardware.

The idea of shared storage for live migration really appeals to me, but I understand with some CLI magic you can live migrate using local storage too ... but the GUI doesn't support it ... and really reboot / offline migration has been "fine".

My questions for this are:
  • Should I do the hyper converged / Ceph thing? Is it not as difficult as my research seems to make it - 10G network, a bunch of disks in each node, need a PhD to understand it?
  • Can I just run Proxmox + vm disks on the single local-lvm disk or should I really keep Proxmox on its own disk?
  • If I just run the single disk - LVM or ZFS?
  • If I keep Proxmox on its own is LVM or ZFS preferred for Proxmox boot disk? What is preferred for non-boot disks?
 

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