Thoughts on coming Proxmox build

[Mattias Hedman]

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.

 

[LnxBil]

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.

 

[macleod]

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.

 

[dendi]

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.

 

[macleod]

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)