Virgin system advice required

[vapour]

Goal:
Self hosted website to facilitate video communication and live streaming between my family and isolated elderly loved-ones. (NOT A BUSINESS)

Equipment:
Dell R710 Server, 2x 2.93GHz X5670 12-Cores Total / 144GB RAM / 6x 2TB 3.5 SAS HDD, H700 w/ 512MB / iDRAC6 / DVD-ROM / 2x 870W PSU., Quad NICs. ASUS RT-AC66U. ZBox-ID88 16GB, 356GB 2.5" SATA 3Gb/s, dual NICs. Netgear ReadyNAS104 3X1TB HDD.

Software:
Video Streaming: Jitsi Meet
Web: Wordpress on Xampp
FW: PFSense w/ddns to Cloudflare, dhcp and dns to the LAN
WiFi Access: OpenWRT??


Questions:
Should I virtualize everything on the 710?
What is the best disk configuration?
What is the best approach for network configuration?

Thanks in advance everyone.

Vapour.

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

Use the NAS for Backup.
Use the IPERC with default LVM-Thin as Storage.

 

[vapour]

Hi,

Use the NAS for Backup.
Use the IPERC with default LVM-Thin as Storage.

Thank you Wolfgang.. The IPERC H700 requires my 6x2TB have RAID. I'm leaning towards RAID6. Are there any issues I need to anticipate using LVM-Thin with hardware RAID6 and could I install Proxmox on a USB and place it in the dedicated boot port on the R710?

On the ZBox-ID88 I've installed Proxmox with the intent of having OpenWRT as my access point, Pfsense for routing, FW w/IDS & Net-mon, DHCP and DNS. Unfortunately, after post install update/dist-upgrade, the new 5.4.65 Linux kernel is not initializing and I manually have to launch 5.4.34. So there is a delay as we speak.

Thanks for your time.

 

[wolfgang]

Generally, you should not use Raid 5/6 for virtualization, because it kills the performance.
I'm inspection at the moment if Raid6 has problems with LVM-Thin.

 

[apoc]

Dont use USB sticks for boot. It gave me and others a lot of trouble. Grab a small ssd (industrial 8gb can be purchased for roughly 10€ on eBay) and place that on the onboard sata port. Will last longer and give you a better experience (search the forums for USB boot trouble if in doubt ).
All the brst

 

[vapour]

Generally, you should not use Raid 5/6 for virtualization, because it kills the performance.
I'm inspection at the moment if Raid6 has problems with LVM-Thin.

Dont use USB sticks for boot. It gave me and others a lot of trouble. Grab a small ssd (industrial 8gb can be purchased for roughly 10€ on eBay) and place that on the onboard sata port. Will last longer and give you a better experience (search the forums for USB boot trouble if in doubt ).
All the brst

Great advice, thanks.

@tburger.
I just installed a 60Gb SSD in a DVD cage from Amazon and have installed PVE, let PVE partition it and it is the R710 boot disk.

@wolfgang.
I configured the IPERC H700 as follows; 4x2Tb in a RAID6 VD, and the other two disks as individual RAID 0 disks... at least for now. But after further reading I'm considering RAID50 for my needs (website with live video streaming during the pandemic and storage of medical information)
Question: If RAID5 or 6 is questionable in a virtualized environment, what is the community at large using?

 

[apoc]

Raid5/6 is not bad per se.
But it must match the workload.
E.g. it is better to use RAID10
- if you have more writes than reads
- if you have random write IO
- if you have small block sizes (IO)

If you are doing mainly reads then raid5/6 can even be better because not all controllers do a distributed read in RAID 10 - but as I said it all depends on what you want to do.

I have started with raid1 (zfs) but switched my backup repository to a raid-z3, because mainly the disks just sit there waiting for some IO. Even though these are 90+% writes I am doing fine, because there is not much going on

See what I mean?