o/ Greetings All!
Apologies in advance for the long post, but I figure more information is usually better. TL
R section at the bottom!
I've been around the block a few times, but new to ProxMox, and I'm not finding exact comparisons for what I'm researching, so I thought I'd post here. I appreciate any comments / pointers / etc that the community has to offer.
Currently I have an old HP Proliant Gen5 (2.3GhZ / 24GB DDR2) connected to 2x NAS through iSCSI as hardwired SANs (1 is a 2 bay 12TB 1.2GHz 512MB RAM, 2nd is 4 bay 12TB 1.3GHz 512MB RAM), the 2 bay is yielding only 6TB as it was mirrored for redundancy. Running a Plex Media Server on Ubuntu, with the iSCSI drives acting as the storage (1 for movies, 1 for TV/etc).
I'm looking installing a bare metal Hypervisor and was looking at KVM, and was pointed towards ZFS and ProxMox.
Fast forward 2 weeks, and here is what my wants/needs are, along with the hardware, and my 'assumptions' that I've made:
REQUIRMENTS:
I'm at the point in school where I'm going to be needing to set up several VMs for a home lab in pursuit of my Cybersecurity degree (so like 2 or 3 server VMs and also a copy of Kali, for both the wife and I to work on, so probably like
1 VM for the Plex server / personal cloud / mail server running full time, and
4 or 5 VMs as needed in a lab for school).
PLANS:
Building a new box, so planning on taking current box and installing ProxMox on it. Key benefit / reason for doing this besides a better CPU/RAM, is the fact that I can put 6 SATA III drives directly in the case (along with 1 M.2 slot), freeing up the NAS devices to be converted over into pure archive/backups for the entire house. (and getting rid of the rack mount HP Proliant power consuming jet engine heater)
AVAILABLE HARDWARE:
Ryzen 7 2700X (8 core) w/ 64GB DDR4 on a Crosshair Hero VII (1x M.2 NVME, 6 SATA III) and an nVidia 1070 GPU (intrigued about graphics pass through on VMs)
Solid State
1x Samsung 970 EVO plus M.2 2TB
1x SANDISK 960GB SSD ***Note, 1 of these SSDs is going into the wife's machine, was planning on the SANDISK
1x Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD
1x Intel 5 Series 480GB SSD
1x Intel 320 Series 120GB SSD
Platters
2x WD Gold CMR 6TB
5x WD Red NAS CMR 6TB
2x WD Red NAS CMR 4TB *** These were in the 2 Bay NAS originally
4x WD Red NAS CMR 3TB *** These were in the 4 Bay NAS originally
6x Seagate Barracuda 8TB Greens
Considerations: Not overly worried about data loss on the server, since I've got a couple of NASs now for backups, more interested in:
read speed >>> write speed >>> redundancy
My original intent was to install KVM on the M.2 and run the 'main VM' (e.g. Plex/P.Cloud/EMail) and lab VMs off of it, EXT4 formatted. Use 1 of the WD Golds as my 'main platter' drive for all things backup related to the M.2 / VM, the 2nd WD Gold as the Plex 'Movie Drive' and 3 of the 5 WD Red NAS drives as a Raid 5, EXT4 'TV/Video Drive', keeping one of the Reds as a spare. Plug in the 8TB 'cudas into the NAS devices (since they're only being used as long term archive/storage with occasional read/writes, and the #01 WD Gold would be the server's primary backup). This set up would give me plenty of 'working' drives (2TB / 6TB) along with 6TB for the Movie Drive and 12TB for the TV Show/Video drive, and 48TB of long term / archive storage.
*** Slight hiccup on this plan, the 4 bay turns out to be limited to 4TB drives, so I'm looking to build a FreeNAS raid with some old parts I've got lying around, and slap the 3TB drives back into the 4 bay and re-purpose it over to an older family member who doesn't need that much storage.
NEW PLAN (after reading up on ProxMox/ZFS):
Put the M.2, an SSD and 5x WD Red NAS drives in the server =
M.2 partitioned up for the ProxMox install, HDD space for the VMs
SSD as a ZIL/SLOG (I assume I can split it into 2 partitions and it should be fine?) and
5x WD Reds as a RAIDZ... 1? which cuts me from 30TB down to 24TB (still gives me room to grow from my current 4TB/10TB multimedia drives)
TLR
With the above listed resources, the couple of questions are:
1. With the choice of a 2TB M.2 NVME, 1TB / 500GB Sata III SSDs, and 120GB Sata II SSD, best practices would be to install ProxMox on the M.2 and use the faster of the 2 500GB Sata III SSDs as a ZIL/SLOG drive?
2. With the choice of 2 WD Gold 6TB, 5 WD Red NAS 6TB, and 6 Barracuda Green 8TBs, using a RAIDZ1 on the 5x WD Reds be the best for performance? ( I assume there would be no benefit to mixing in the 2x WD Gold 6TBs, and can find a better home for them, say as my primary platter drive for housing Steam Games, etc on my machine)
3. Regarding the NAS I'm planning on building (and using the current 2x 8TB NAS in the mean time), is there any way/benefit to 'add it' to a ZFS pool ? I can't run FreeNAS on the current set up, to my knowledge, as one is an Iomega (Lenovo) NAS and the 2nd is a NetGear ReadyNAS, which I can put in traditional RAID / JBOD and are formatted as EXT4. I figure once I get the new NAS built in the next month and put all 6 8TB drives in it, I can run RAIDZ2 on it (or figure out this RAIDZ Mirror bit I read about) for a 32TB backup/long term archive NAS with plenty of redundancy built in.
Any comments are most appreciated (e.g. If maybe I should install ProxMox on the 500GB SSD and partition the M.2 into a ZIL/SLOG drive and the rest of it for storing/using VMs)... Thanks in advance all! Cheers!
Apologies in advance for the long post, but I figure more information is usually better. TL
R section at the bottom!I've been around the block a few times, but new to ProxMox, and I'm not finding exact comparisons for what I'm researching, so I thought I'd post here. I appreciate any comments / pointers / etc that the community has to offer.
Currently I have an old HP Proliant Gen5 (2.3GhZ / 24GB DDR2) connected to 2x NAS through iSCSI as hardwired SANs (1 is a 2 bay 12TB 1.2GHz 512MB RAM, 2nd is 4 bay 12TB 1.3GHz 512MB RAM), the 2 bay is yielding only 6TB as it was mirrored for redundancy. Running a Plex Media Server on Ubuntu, with the iSCSI drives acting as the storage (1 for movies, 1 for TV/etc).
I'm looking installing a bare metal Hypervisor and was looking at KVM, and was pointed towards ZFS and ProxMox.
Fast forward 2 weeks, and here is what my wants/needs are, along with the hardware, and my 'assumptions' that I've made:
REQUIRMENTS:
I'm at the point in school where I'm going to be needing to set up several VMs for a home lab in pursuit of my Cybersecurity degree (so like 2 or 3 server VMs and also a copy of Kali, for both the wife and I to work on, so probably like
1 VM for the Plex server / personal cloud / mail server running full time, and
4 or 5 VMs as needed in a lab for school).
PLANS:
Building a new box, so planning on taking current box and installing ProxMox on it. Key benefit / reason for doing this besides a better CPU/RAM, is the fact that I can put 6 SATA III drives directly in the case (along with 1 M.2 slot), freeing up the NAS devices to be converted over into pure archive/backups for the entire house. (and getting rid of the rack mount HP Proliant power consuming jet engine heater)
AVAILABLE HARDWARE:
Ryzen 7 2700X (8 core) w/ 64GB DDR4 on a Crosshair Hero VII (1x M.2 NVME, 6 SATA III) and an nVidia 1070 GPU (intrigued about graphics pass through on VMs)
Solid State
1x Samsung 970 EVO plus M.2 2TB
1x SANDISK 960GB SSD ***Note, 1 of these SSDs is going into the wife's machine, was planning on the SANDISK
1x Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD
1x Intel 5 Series 480GB SSD
1x Intel 320 Series 120GB SSD
Platters
2x WD Gold CMR 6TB
5x WD Red NAS CMR 6TB
2x WD Red NAS CMR 4TB *** These were in the 2 Bay NAS originally
4x WD Red NAS CMR 3TB *** These were in the 4 Bay NAS originally
6x Seagate Barracuda 8TB Greens
Considerations: Not overly worried about data loss on the server, since I've got a couple of NASs now for backups, more interested in:
read speed >>> write speed >>> redundancy
My original intent was to install KVM on the M.2 and run the 'main VM' (e.g. Plex/P.Cloud/EMail) and lab VMs off of it, EXT4 formatted. Use 1 of the WD Golds as my 'main platter' drive for all things backup related to the M.2 / VM, the 2nd WD Gold as the Plex 'Movie Drive' and 3 of the 5 WD Red NAS drives as a Raid 5, EXT4 'TV/Video Drive', keeping one of the Reds as a spare. Plug in the 8TB 'cudas into the NAS devices (since they're only being used as long term archive/storage with occasional read/writes, and the #01 WD Gold would be the server's primary backup). This set up would give me plenty of 'working' drives (2TB / 6TB) along with 6TB for the Movie Drive and 12TB for the TV Show/Video drive, and 48TB of long term / archive storage.
*** Slight hiccup on this plan, the 4 bay turns out to be limited to 4TB drives, so I'm looking to build a FreeNAS raid with some old parts I've got lying around, and slap the 3TB drives back into the 4 bay and re-purpose it over to an older family member who doesn't need that much storage.
NEW PLAN (after reading up on ProxMox/ZFS):
Put the M.2, an SSD and 5x WD Red NAS drives in the server =
M.2 partitioned up for the ProxMox install, HDD space for the VMs
SSD as a ZIL/SLOG (I assume I can split it into 2 partitions and it should be fine?) and
5x WD Reds as a RAIDZ... 1? which cuts me from 30TB down to 24TB (still gives me room to grow from my current 4TB/10TB multimedia drives)
TL
RWith the above listed resources, the couple of questions are:
1. With the choice of a 2TB M.2 NVME, 1TB / 500GB Sata III SSDs, and 120GB Sata II SSD, best practices would be to install ProxMox on the M.2 and use the faster of the 2 500GB Sata III SSDs as a ZIL/SLOG drive?
2. With the choice of 2 WD Gold 6TB, 5 WD Red NAS 6TB, and 6 Barracuda Green 8TBs, using a RAIDZ1 on the 5x WD Reds be the best for performance? ( I assume there would be no benefit to mixing in the 2x WD Gold 6TBs, and can find a better home for them, say as my primary platter drive for housing Steam Games, etc on my machine)
3. Regarding the NAS I'm planning on building (and using the current 2x 8TB NAS in the mean time), is there any way/benefit to 'add it' to a ZFS pool ? I can't run FreeNAS on the current set up, to my knowledge, as one is an Iomega (Lenovo) NAS and the 2nd is a NetGear ReadyNAS, which I can put in traditional RAID / JBOD and are formatted as EXT4. I figure once I get the new NAS built in the next month and put all 6 8TB drives in it, I can run RAIDZ2 on it (or figure out this RAIDZ Mirror bit I read about) for a 32TB backup/long term archive NAS with plenty of redundancy built in.
Any comments are most appreciated (e.g. If maybe I should install ProxMox on the 500GB SSD and partition the M.2 into a ZIL/SLOG drive and the rest of it for storing/using VMs)... Thanks in advance all! Cheers!