Storage Setup

[Thalhammer]

Hello,
I have recently bought some new hardware for my homeserver and would like to run proxmox ve on it in order to be able to quickly setup virtual servers.
In addition to test vm's there will be one that runs my whole house, which means:

• Backup of PC's
• Mediaserver (NFS/MySQL for Kodi clients)
• TVHeadend (Live TV streaming)
• DNS/DHCP Server
• Home automation

Currentlly these things are run by a old quad core with 4GB DDR2. I currently have 6 Drives

1. 500 GB OS
2. 3x 4TB RAID5 (Data)
3. 2x 8TB RAID1 (Data)

All are configured for software raid and both data raids are combined using LVM to form a big partition. However I like to change this structure to a zfs pool because of several reasons:

• Snapshots (Big one, because I have no Backup*)
• I don't trust my RAID 5
• ZFS looks more scalable and better with silent data corruption

The new setup will have 2x8TB + 4x4TB forming 3xRAID 1.
Proxmox and VM's will be stored on a 500GB SSD which could also be used as a ZFS cache.
However I don't have much experience with ZFS and even less with ZFS on Proxmox.
So I'd like to know if my design is a good one.
In case it matters, the new hardware will be a Xeon E5 system with 64GB ECC DDR4.

*Most of those 16TB are Video files, which I don't consider so important that a Backup would be necessary (BD/DVD copies, I still have the physical disk). The important parts are encrypted and uploaded to Amazon S3 using a cron job.

 

[LnxBil]

Sounds OK, yet I would not mix drive sizes with ZFS due to performance reasons in a production environment - for home use it is probably OK.

With the stock installer it is not possible to manually partition your SSD, so you have to do a Debian Jessie upgrade to Proxmox VE or repartition after the stock Proxmox VE install for a L2ARC partition (or LVM).

You can still backup your files to the soon-to-be-free disks with ZFS send/receive.