Thoughts on coming Proxmox build

Mattias Hedman

Well-Known Member
Jan 19, 2019
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It is time to upgrade my Proxmox server, it is an HP Proiiant DL380 G6, atm with 1 Xeon and 32 Gb of RAM.
It has an P410i RAID-card.
In the upcoming month I will be upgradign the server with 1 Xeon and 32 Gb RAM.
Resulting in 2 Xeon 2,25 Ghz processors and 64 Gb of RAM.
Inside I got 5 600 Gb SAS disks and 3 250 Gb SAS disks.

I do wanna let Proxmox use ZFS, so one thought is to do evey disk in RAID-0, but I have heard both good things and bad things about it.

Second, after lots of reading many recommended a HP 24 Bay 3GB SAS Expander Card, to go around the P410i completly to get truly independant disks.
But that comes with a cost.

So has anyone succesfully setup proxmox with a p410i using RAID-0, or that a no go, never think about it again.
 
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So has anyone succesfully setup proxmox with a p410i using RAID-0, or that a no go, never think about it again.

It does work but is not recommended.

Inside I got 5 600 Gb SAS disks and 3 250 Gb SAS disks.

I would replace the 250 GB also with 600 GB so that all drives are the same.

Second, after lots of reading many recommended a HP 24 Bay 3GB SAS Expander Card, to go around the P410i completly to get truly independant disks.
But that comes with a cost.

We also use an external shelf MSA60 with an additional SAS controller for ZFS. The most expensive part of this setup are the drive caddys. That is really ridiculous.
 
So has anyone succesfully setup proxmox with a p410i using RAID-0, or that a no go, never think about it again.

Not quite the best solution, I hope you do have enough cache memory and battery for p410i, you cannot create more than 2 raid arrays (even raid0) without it. And good luck when replacing hard drives with zfs over raid0, it will be really a PITA.
IIRC, from Gen8 of DL380 you have p420 as raid controller, which supports JBOD.
 
I think you will get better performance by creating an hardware raid array and use a single virtual disk (raid0) with zfs.
I use this setup with a couple of dell server with no problem, except the grub boot one. This issue should be solved with proxmox 6 and uefi boot.
 
I think you will get better performance by creating an hardware raid array and use a single virtual disk (raid0) with zfs.
I use this setup with a couple of dell server with no problem, except the grub boot one. This issue should be solved with proxmox 6 and uefi boot.
By doing that you loose one of the best strenghts and features of zfs: error auto-detection and auto-healing. Well, in fact error detection will still work, but it will be like: zfs found an error, zfs can do nothing, it's your problem now! Remember: hardware non-raid 0 (and non zfs, non raid-0 software raid) can only detect errors. But if let's say on raid 1 you have 2 different informations, which one is the right one ? (assuming you do not have checksums)
 

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