single host, many drives, advice..?

[sgtfoo]

Hello all!

Very glad to have found Proxmox, as I was indecisive between XenServer and VMWare for the past little while.

Currently, I have a home server that consists of mostly desktop-grade parts. It's running Fedora 14 and (Amahi.org) management software for all its functionality.
My intention is to make this single host box a virtual host with Proxmox and rebuild my Fedora server and a few others as virtuals.
Regarding resources, currently the machine is:

- AMD dual-core Athlon2 X64 CPU
- 8 GB RAM
- all SATA HDDs:
--2x WD Green (5900RPM) 1.5TB & 2TB;
--2x WD Blue (7200RPM) 1TB;
-- a system drive.. WD Raptor (7200RPM) 74GB
- single on-board Gb NIC

How many fully virtualized VMs will I see able to run on this box? I've no issue with adding more power or storage.
I'd like to fit:
- 2x Fedora VMs
- 3x Windows Server 2008 VMs
- 3x various other Linux VMs

Is this doable, or crazy?? I'm new to the amount of resources required for this.

I'm guessing the bottleneck will be the single NIC and the hard drives.

Note that first thing upon rebuilding is a 8-core CPU and 16GB of RAM however.

So? thoughts?

 

[macday]

Hello,

IHMO the most important Part is a really good and fast Raid-Card with BBU and RAID-10. I installed over 20 PVE Servers with different Hardware. It was always good with a good RAID-Card.

Cheers

 

[drd]

I think the RAM is very important here. If all your VM's need 1 GB RAM, they will (almost) fit in the 8 GB you have. Whether the HDDs or the NICs will be a bottleneck will depend on the load I would say.

 

[WaltervdSchee]

To get a feel for ProxMox I installed it on my homeserver and its running fabulously.
Its a quadCore Q9550 with 8GB ram, a HighPoint RR3520 (Intel IOP-based) 8port SATA-RAID controller, an Intel 2 port Gbit/s LAN adapter .
Its currently running 5 Linux KVM's ( 1x webserver (multi-site, both internal and external + webmail) 1x mail server (Postfix+IMAPS) 1x database server, 1x monitor server (Zabbix) , 1x fileserver (NFS + SMB + SABnzb downloading) ) It still has some free space in mem for 1 or 2 full KVM's.
I think that your bottleneck will be RAM, when using different OS KVM's, the ksm daemon will probably be not as successful at finding shared pages to free up physical memory.

 

[charnov]

RAM you're going to be tight, but I would worry more about cores unless this is very low usage. I have found that 2008R2 loves being virtualized and have been pretty happy with my consolidation ratios but I am running on E5620 (4 cores plus HT version 2) Xeons so YMMV. IO if on local storage should be fine. I get near native drive speeds on local and that's on hard core fileservers. Light use should be fine. Again, with so little RAM if it swaps it going to thrash. 16GB is very cheap right now and so is a 4 - 8 core CPU.

 

[sgtfoo]

Regarding usage, I will be using
1 Linux VM for file server, backups, downloads, and media server.
1 Linux VM for a vortexbox
1 Linux VM for various tinkering & thin desktop usage.
3 Windows Server 2008r2 VMs for learning/study for MCITP


Now that I know about hardware needs, I've a question about the setup/installation.

I currently have that OS-dedicated drive in the system and the 4 other drives for storage. During the installation of Proxmox, do I have the option of setting it to use the OS drive for itself and then let me setup the 4 others drives as the place for all my VMs?

 

[drd]

I believe that's not the case. The installer might use all drives as physical volumes for one large volume group it will create.

I recommend removing the 4 drives, installing proxmox, adding the 4 drives again, and then assigning these as storage for VMs.

 

[sgtfoo]

Does anyone else run Proxmox in a single host alone? How's it been? What are you running as VMs? What hardware is it all on?

 

[charnov]

We started with a single node to test that ran on a used Dell 1950 (2x Xeon 5150 dual core @ 2.66GHz w/20GB RAM). We ran 12 Windows 2003 32 bit server instances for prototyping and testing. I was going to not use it in production but it ran so well that it is part of our production cluster now (it had been a testing machine when running ESXi).

It currently has 8 VM's (3 linux and 5 Windows server 2003) running in production and has been rock solid. Our other servers are Dell R410's with 32GB of ram and E5620 processors (quad core with HT) and those are monsters with Proxmox. I can run 20 - 40 windows server VMs no problem. RAM and IO contention become issues sooner than anything else. I imagine you could run tons of OpenVZ instances off of this (I remember someone telling me they ran 200 webserver containers off of the same hardware).