Hi, I hope the title sounds not too confusing for what my idea of a new home lab might be.
I have a Fractile Node 304 box with a asrock J5040 board + 16 GB of ram. I also have some retired Intel NUCs/ DELL mini optiplex 3050 from work.
The node 304 can handle a max of 6 drives and the Asrock motherboard has 4 SATA drives + 1 M2 Key M slot + 1 PCI 3 x1 slot.
The disks will be SSD's.
The M2 slot is mSata capable, given the option to run proxmox of mSata or use the M2 slot for a 2 x Sata adapter connector to fill all 6 drive bays and still run proxmox from a flash drive.
The PCI 3 1x should be fine to use a 2.5 GBit ( perhaps 5 Gbit ?) NIC card.
The idea is to use the node 304 box as a "pure" storage, connected to a switch. The Intel NUCs' will also be connected to the switch.
The NUC's will be used as vm host, running the images from the network storage.
The NUCs could be fitted with USB 3 adapters to match the 2.5/5 Gbit network speed.
The question which is bothering me atm is the storage setup for the Node 304 storage box.
I want to run a file server / NAS directly from the storage + the serving VM images to the "host" machines.
The current idea is to use 2 x SSd in raid 1 with ZFS and use this as a NAS. I do not really need a Truenas solution, just basic smb/nfs file storage
To store the VM images, I am a bit confused on what might be a good solution. ZFS , LVM ? Create logical disks and attache to the vm?
The vms wil run Linux with ext 4 or Windows with ntfs ( windows tiny11 sounds like a good option here ). qcow2 images might be of interest.
Most of the vms will be services like MS SQL , MongoDB, GitLab, nginx/apache , IIS.
At least 1 vm will be used with windows to run Visual Studio for application development.
The main reason to use the storage -> network -> vm-host machine approach is scalability as the vm will grow in numbers, like
AD, ldap, freeipa, IDM, .... for development and architectural development / experimentation.
Backup of the storage server is a different topic and might be cloud or Proxmox backup server. This will be decided later,
I will be the only user of the setup.
So, in case you have a similar setup running, any advice on setup? Or in case my idea is simply stupid, what might be a good approach to a more scalable storage vm serving solution using Proxmox?
I have a Fractile Node 304 box with a asrock J5040 board + 16 GB of ram. I also have some retired Intel NUCs/ DELL mini optiplex 3050 from work.
The node 304 can handle a max of 6 drives and the Asrock motherboard has 4 SATA drives + 1 M2 Key M slot + 1 PCI 3 x1 slot.
The disks will be SSD's.
The M2 slot is mSata capable, given the option to run proxmox of mSata or use the M2 slot for a 2 x Sata adapter connector to fill all 6 drive bays and still run proxmox from a flash drive.
The PCI 3 1x should be fine to use a 2.5 GBit ( perhaps 5 Gbit ?) NIC card.
The idea is to use the node 304 box as a "pure" storage, connected to a switch. The Intel NUCs' will also be connected to the switch.
The NUC's will be used as vm host, running the images from the network storage.
The NUCs could be fitted with USB 3 adapters to match the 2.5/5 Gbit network speed.
The question which is bothering me atm is the storage setup for the Node 304 storage box.
I want to run a file server / NAS directly from the storage + the serving VM images to the "host" machines.
The current idea is to use 2 x SSd in raid 1 with ZFS and use this as a NAS. I do not really need a Truenas solution, just basic smb/nfs file storage
To store the VM images, I am a bit confused on what might be a good solution. ZFS , LVM ? Create logical disks and attache to the vm?
The vms wil run Linux with ext 4 or Windows with ntfs ( windows tiny11 sounds like a good option here ). qcow2 images might be of interest.
Most of the vms will be services like MS SQL , MongoDB, GitLab, nginx/apache , IIS.
At least 1 vm will be used with windows to run Visual Studio for application development.
The main reason to use the storage -> network -> vm-host machine approach is scalability as the vm will grow in numbers, like
AD, ldap, freeipa, IDM, .... for development and architectural development / experimentation.
Backup of the storage server is a different topic and might be cloud or Proxmox backup server. This will be decided later,
I will be the only user of the setup.
So, in case you have a similar setup running, any advice on setup? Or in case my idea is simply stupid, what might be a good approach to a more scalable storage vm serving solution using Proxmox?
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