# How would you setup these drives?



## KuJoe (May 18, 2013)

So I am building a Proxmox server for my own personal use. I will be hosting about a dozen VPSs with some being used daily while others will be running in the background processing data. At the time I purchased the server, I had planned on installing ESXi and syncing it with my other ESXi server for redundancy but ESXi has a RAM limit of 32GB so I switched up my plans and went with Proxmox instead. Nothing on here is critical where uptime is a factor but I will be using these VPSs so having to install everything from scratch is something I want to avoid if possible. What is the best way to utilize these drives so that in the event of drive failure I could get things back up and running with minimal effort.

500GB SATA (Enterprise)

1TB SATA (Consumer)

1TB SATA (Consumer)

The server does not have hardware RAID and I currently have Proxmox installed on the 500GB drive with the 2 1TB drives going unused (although they are configured as one big LVM for now). Should I just setup an rsync script to backup the VPSs each night to the 1TB drive? Should I look into software RAID or LVM mirroring?

To throw something else in the mix, I have a few TB of storage I can mount via NFS if needed (limited to 100Mbps though).

Thoughts?


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## serverian (May 18, 2013)

KuJoe said:


> Should I just setup an rsync script to backup the VPSs each night to the 1TB drive?


 

Yes.


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## herbyscrub (May 18, 2013)

Can you clone the 500GB onto one of the 1TB?  Then just rsync vzdumps nightly going forward.  You can probably end being able to just change boot order if the 500GB fails and get back up in a few minutes.


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## AnthonySmith (May 18, 2013)

mdadm raid 1 with the 2 x 1TB and mount the 500GB as /mnt/backup add the backup storage to proxmox and schedule (Insert Time Here) live snapshots to the 500GB drive


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## Hassan (May 18, 2013)

AnthonySmith said:


> mdadm raid 1 with the 2 x 1TB and mount the 500GB as /mnt/backup add the backup storage to proxmox and schedule (Insert Time Here) live snapshots to the 500GB drive


What he said


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## tallship (May 23, 2013)

KuJoe said:


> ...but ESXi has a RAM limit of 32GB


I don't understand. We have several ESXi hosts in our vSphere farms with 72 and 128GB RAM installed. And if you were using VMware you could just clone, take advantage of HA in your cluster for added redundancy (You'll need to incorporate a SAN), etc., and you can also incorporate snapshotting too.

When you say, however, that your machine's controller doesn't support hardware RAID, I suspect that the first place you should visit is VMware's HCL though 

I would definately make the case for VMware over Proxmox, but in saying so, and getting back to the point I made above about HA, pull those two 1TB drives, pick up either two or four more (yielding a total of either 4 or 6 x 1TB HDDs, and a $10 USB stick or the cheapest, smallest HDD you can find to install OMV onto bare metal - or even better, skip the USB stick or small HDD and install OMV as a VM under VMware. Then add all of the rest of the space from those drives to OMV (thin provisioned).

install the iSCSI plugin, and add that ESXi host to your cluster in vCenter. I don't care much for wYNd0ze, so to save some cash by not having to buy a license from mACROsFOT, you can just install the SLES based vCenter appliance from the .OVA instead, which is free, and then you have the choice of web administration or installing a vSphere client on a local wYNd0z3 box.

As far as the hardware goes, you don't have to spend a lot on a controller - just make sure it's on the HCL.

Regardless of whether you go bare metal or run OMV as a VM, Here's what you'll get, in terms of performance and fault tolerance at the hardware level for that SAN host at RAID 10 (usually RAID 0+1, but pretty much the same difference):

If 4 x 1TB HDDs

Capacity 2TB Speed gain 4x read and 2x write speed gain Fault tolerance At least 1-drive failure

If 6 x 1TB HDDs

Capacity 3TB Speed gain 6x read and 3x write speed gain Fault tolerance At least 1-drive failure

Pretty sweet, and you can address all of those cloning needs you seek too  And don't forget about Veeam either! They just released a new version yesterday I think too.

I hope that helps!

Kindest regards,


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## Enterprisevpssolutions (May 23, 2013)

To use proxmox they recommend to use a HW raid controller but you can setup the system with SW raid you would just need to create it after the install, that said most virtualization technology you would require a HW controller for performance even if you don't have a bbu it will still perform better than SW raid just make sure you set the i/o scheduler to either deadline or noop.

That said proxmox 2.x gives you the ability to create snapshots of a live system, create Vbridges and more. Not to mention openvz if you require it.

Your setup you have 3 drive 2 1tb and a 500g

As stated above you can setup the 2 1tb drives in a raid 1 and install proxmox then setup the secondary drive for backups if you want as its not in a raid so i would make sure you have your backups copied elsewhere. 2.x you don't need a secondary drive anymore to do snapshots you can do that right out of a directory now.  proxmox 3.0 rc2 is out and soon the new release with template creation and the splice protocol for desktop virtualization will add some great functionality to the already great interface.


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## herbyscrub (May 23, 2013)

tallship said:


> I don't understand. We have several ESXi hosts in our vSphere farms with 72 and 128GB RAM installed. And if you were using VMware you could just clone, take advantage of HA in your cluster for added redundancy (You'll need to incorporate a SAN), etc., and you can also incorporate snapshotting too.
> 
> When you say, however, that your machine's controller doesn't support hardware RAID, I suspect that the first place you should visit is VMware's HCL though
> 
> ...


He's got a cheap rented dedicated server, don't think he's going to go through all of that especially with the unaffordable VMware licenses.  The free ESXi has a 32GB physical limit on the box.


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## tallship (May 23, 2013)

herbyscrub said:


> He's got a cheap rented dedicated server, don't think he's going to go through all of that especially with the unaffordable VMware licenses. The free ESXi has a 32GB physical limit on the box.


Oh, free. yes. Use something other than VMware then lol. I wouldn't recommend the free ESXi unless it was for an onsite SOHO where they needed a few virtual machines on a single box of bare metal, which works good, just not suitable in a provider capacity.

Proxmox should work well for his application, considering his available resources.


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