Storage space allocation - best practice?

[Lukasz]

Hi!
Will the Proxmox 4.x bind mount work for VM (qemu)? Maybe there is another way to mount folder there?
I have a server with 12x3TB disks. I want to create two RAID volumes:
1. 2x3TB RAID 1 for Proxmox installation, VMs and CTs
2. 10x3TB RAID 5 for STORAGE
I want to mount the STORAGE under CT that will be my backup machine - this can be done by bind mount (I want to put there backups from my remote servers). But I want to have access to this file system also from other VMs or CTs as well. Does this make sense? Is there any other good practice to build such system?

 

[LnxBil]

bind mount only works inside your current proxmox installation. Qemu boots its own kernel, so bind-mound are not possible, but you can mount a network based filesystem instead, like NFS, CIFS or AFP.

How much is your I/O load? Normally you'd give as much disks to VMs and only a few to backup. I don't know about your remote backups, but try to use some deduplication techniques for backup. You can decrease the amount of necessary space dramatically by using simple techniques like rsync. If you want better and more advanced techniques try a CoW system like ZFS or BTRFS.

Why not build a RAID50 over the 12 disks and store everything there? You can also use ZFS if you do not have a hardware raid controller (or one with a IT-mode flashed firmware on it).