Storage arrangement tips

[sickmitch]

Hello there! I have a tiny homelab serving all my stuff, all smooth and fun.
I stumpled upon a Dell GL360 Gen9, with a bare minimum setup of 1 Xeon and 32 gigs of RAM. The other unit for the lab is a Zima board with 4 gigs. I've been using an old laptop to serve my stuff for many years so I taked the chance to get my hands on some more professional equipment. I use proxmox to virtualize everything (on the Zima I have a NAS and a PBS and on the Dell I will trow anything else (jellyfin, nextcloud, navidrome, gittea, ecc)).
How would you arrange the storage? Thanks for your wise POV
I have
- couple 1TB SSD SATA
- 1 1TB SSD USB which i can open to turn to a SATA
- 3 HDD in total 1TB
I need to store
- media to be served (jelly,navidrome)
- data to be accessible (passwords database, nextcloud stuff)
- backups

PS: backups stored locally will be a minor part of the total backups, i do cold storage on a remote server monthly

 

[louie1961]

Here's one way to do it, not necessarily the best way. My main Proxmox node is 1L HP Elitedesk mini PC. It has two NVME slots for storage. I have 2 1 TB SSDs in a ZFS mirror. I store the OS and my VM images on those drives. The OS takes up an incredibly small amount of space. My VMs also do not take up too much room. I keep them small (32GB) and expand them only as needed. I've got 5 VMs and 2 CTs and because of thin storage, I am only using around 2% of my drive space total. I store all of my important data on a separate NAS, that runs in a mirrored array. My data that I need to keep persistent in my VMs and docker containers is served up via NFS share directly into the VMs or via a bind mount to my docker containers. I also back up my VMs to the NAS, and I keep my ISOs on the NAS. That NAS backups to a second discrete NAS onsite and to the cloud, so I always have 3 copies of my data.

If I had more storage connections in the Proxmox node, I would prefer to keep my OS and VM storage separate. But I don't because I consider mirroring to be more important. My network is a 2.5g network for the most part, so keeping anything is a raid 5 or 6 arrangement doesn't really seem useful/appealing to me. Performance of the NFS shares is adequate for my needs. BUT I don't serve up any media via plex, etc. My use cases are mainly externally served Wordpress websites, Nexcloud and some miscellaneous services like Grocy, Joplin, Bitwarden, Ansible, Docker, Portainer, Photoprism, etc.

I use Cloudflare tunnels to expose my websites, so I get the benefit of Cloudflare's CDN caching. As a result, my websites are plenty fast. Otherwise I might be temped to change my setup.

 

[sickmitch]

Here's one way to do it, not necessarily the best way. My main Proxmox node is 1L HP Elitedesk mini PC. It has two NVME slots for storage. I have 2 1 TB SSDs in a ZFS mirror. I store the OS and my VM images on those drives. The OS takes up an incredibly small amount of space. My VMs also do not take up too much room. I keep them small (32GB) and expand them only as needed. I've got 5 VMs and 2 CTs and because of thin storage, I am only using around 2% of my drive space total. I store all of my important data on a separate NAS, that runs in a mirrored array. My data that I need to keep persistent in my VMs and docker containers is served up via NFS share directly into the VMs or via a bind mount to my docker containers. I also back up my VMs to the NAS, and I keep my ISOs on the NAS. That NAS backups to a second discrete NAS onsite and to the cloud, so I always have 3 copies of my data.

If I had more storage connections in the Proxmox node, I would prefer to keep my OS and VM storage separate. But I don't because I consider mirroring to be more important. My network is a 2.5g network for the most part, so keeping anything is a raid 5 or 6 arrangement doesn't really seem useful/appealing to me. Performance of the NFS shares is adequate for my needs. BUT I don't serve up any media via plex, etc. My use cases are mainly externally served Wordpress websites, Nexcloud and some miscellaneous services like Grocy, Joplin, Bitwarden, Ansible, Docker, Portainer, Photoprism, etc.

I use Cloudflare tunnels to expose my websites, so I get the benefit of Cloudflare's CDN caching. As a result, my websites are plenty fast. Otherwise I might be temped to change my setup.

Thanks for sharing, I like you're setup! Since I have the possibility to attach plenty drives to my HP (8) I could replicate your setup adding one SSD to store the media on the HP to have them locally avaible and passed to the VM purposed to the stream.