Tips and advices : Swap, setup and HDD sharing

[cult]

Hy everyone,

I need advices and tips on my home lab server setup and more on some particular configurations and performance topics. I will start by describing my setup and will ask my question after so you can have the big picture. Please do not hesitate to give me your opinion or point me in the right direction, I am willing to learn and opened to any suggestion. Also, sorry for my poor English writing skill, as it's not my primary langage and i don't write often in English.

Proxmox server :

Core hardwares
Assus Strix B550-F
AMD Ryzen 5600x 6 Cores
64G RAM 3200
Gigabyte lan Network all wired

For now I only run two main VM, but as soon as I have more control over the performance, configuration and monitoring, I will provision full web developpement stack and a windows 10 machine for software testing. For now, my main purpose is the Plex server (playback and not streaming)

1 x VM with Ubuntu Server for Docker container
2 x CPU (1 socket, 2 cores : host), 8G RAM (balloon = 0)

1. Portainer
2. Plex
3. InfluxDb
4. Grafina
5. Kativa

1 x VM with OpenMediaVault (OMV) for Samba and NFS Sharing
2 x CPU (1 socket, 2 cores : host), 8G RAM (balloon = 0)
1 x 8T WD Black passthrough

I use this VM only to share my disk to docker container and to my device on my network
I do not want to setup a raid or any redondancy, but eventualy I will make a backup strategy for crucial files

Questions

1. Does my setup make any sens and/or what is your advice ?
2. Should I isolate my influxDb and Grafina container on another VM or should I stop using that type of monitoring ?
3. What's the proper swap file (partition) size or config on the main node (proxmox)
   1. When I look with the free command => 8Gi Swap file for 62Gi mem
4. What's the proper swap file (partition) size for each VM ?
   1. VM1 (Ubuntu) : When i look free -h => 4Gi swap for 7.8Gi mem (default setting)
   2. VM2 (OMV) : When i look free -h => 974Mi swap for 7.8Gi mem (default setting)
5. What'S the best way for monitoring I/O and I/O wait time (don't have the metric on proxmox or in the Grafina dashboard)
   1. When i look Plex container on Portainer, the agregat I/O metric is very high but when i look on the main node (Proxmox core OS), the disk is not that much solicitated
6. Is the HDD passtrough to the OMV VM and share with Samba and NSF is the best way to go?

The swap files or swap partition is my main concern for the moment, I try to understand the purpose or the standard but there are so many opposite opinions on that topic.

Thank you in advance for your advices, tips and opinions.

Cult.

 

[Dunuin]

Questions

1. Does my setup make any sens and/or what is your advice ?

Sounds ok.

1. Should I isolate my influxDb and Grafina container on another VM or should I stop using that type of monitoring ?

Monitoring is always useful as long as your SSD can handle the writes.

1. What's the proper swap file (partition) size or config on the main node (proxmox)
   1. When I look with the free command => 8Gi Swap file for 62Gi mem

8GB sounds fine.

• What's the proper swap file (partition) size for each VM ?
  1. VM1 (Ubuntu) : When i look free -h => 4Gi swap for 7.8Gi mem (default setting)
  2. VM2 (OMV) : When i look free -h => 974Mi swap for 7.8Gi mem (default setting)

It isn't that important as hopefully your swap isn't used much at all when enough RAM is available. I would assign 1 or 2 GB for a guest with 8GB RAM.

• What'S the best way for monitoring I/O and I/O wait time (don't have the metric on proxmox or in the Grafina dashboard)
  1. When i look Plex container on Portainer, the agregat I/O metric is very high but when i look on the main node (Proxmox core OS), the disk is not that much solicitated

Not sure about that for graphana. I use Zabbix for monitoring and there the zabbix agent is monitoring it.

• Is the HDD passtrough to the OMV VM and share with Samba and NSF is the best way to go?

Jup.

The swap files or swap partition is my main concern for the moment, I try to understand the purpose or the standard but there are so many opposite opinions on that topic.

In general you shouldn't try to overprovision your RAM so all VMs should always got enough RAM so swapping isn't really needed. Many people also disable swapping. I personally set my swappiness everywhere to 1 so swap will only be used to prevent the OOM killer from killing processes.
In that case you don't need much RAM. I usually give my VMs min 512MB, max 8GB or around 1/8 of my assigned RAM.