ZFS, EXT4 or LVM for dell PE R720

[BrandonN]

I would like tips about the system disk configuration, can someone advice me please?, I found a lot information and I am begginer in this.
We have as I mentioned a Dell PE R720 with 3 physical disk with 1 Tb each one and 88 Gb RAM, and I don't know which would be the best installation type, ext4, zfs or lvm.
We need in special a good performance, maybe zfs RAID 0, but I'm not sure -- I need to migrate a lot of VM from VMware to PROXMOX.
Thanks in advance. Bless.

 

[Deli Veli]

This is actually funny, about the same time I have created a very similar topic. It is the second one on the list in the Forum (for now). We also have a production level setup requirements. We are using NVMe High performance SSDs and looking into the best performing FS while having data redundancy and fault tolerance.

To my findings, Raidz-1 would give fault tolerance however turned out to be much slower than having one of those drives formatted as xfs or ext4. So if I take an NVMe drive and format it to be xfs, mount it and use it, it is extremely fast. If I create a Raidz-1 out of them, they are about 40% slower which is a huge difference. Raidz-1 on 3 NVMe ssd drives almost gives same performance as non high performance ssd drives which is worrisome.

I could not find an alternative solution yet, however I will keep looking. My research points to creating Raidz-1 or Raidz-2 depending on how much space you can sacrifice but as I said above, my performance benchmarks are disappointing for Raidz-1. Below is the link to me topic as well. Lets collaborate on findings.

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/w...for-proxmox-5-2-on-4-x-nvme-ssd-drives.49509/

 

[BrandonN]

Thank you so much @Deli Veli , I'm understanding a lot of things, thanks a lot.

 

[Deli Veli]

Hi @BrandonN so RAID over LVM gives the best performance as it currently stands. Check out the thread above. Might help you out as well.

 

[alexskysilk]

We have as I mentioned a Dell PE R720 with 3 physical disk with 1 Tb each one and 88 Gb RAM, and I don't know which would be the best installation type, ext4, zfs or lvm.
We need in special a good performance, maybe zfs RAID 0, but I'm not sure

3 1TB drives doesnt give you many options. RAID0 is not an option for any data you actually care about. Best performance would be as @Deli Veli suggested, but afaik dell perc controllers dont do RAID1e so 3 drives would not be usable that way. Best performance would be LVM over JBOD but this doesnt buy you any fault tolerance; moreover, "best" performance is relative- 7200rpm spinning rust is painfully slow by 2018 standards...