Hi Myke,
Ah, I see. I agree with you on the installer. It would be great if
future versions provide more guided storage configurations. I've heard
rumor that PVE 2.0 may include some network-based filesystems, but I
digress.
Recently I've had to dig in pretty deep with LVM while customizing a new
Proxmox system. It sounds like we had similar experience where the
installer asks which hdd to install to, but leaves the other unused,
yes? The first time through I used LVM to extend the /var/lib/vz
partitions to include the second hard drive. This site made that
process quite painless and fast.
http://lucaschan.com/weblog/2007/06/29/adding-a-physical-disk-to-lvm-in-redhatcentos/
Due to some requirements in how my new PVE server will be deployed and
utilized, I finally backed off that approach and shifted gears slightly.
I settled on extending /var/lib/vz to use some of the space on the
second hard drive and the remainder I am using for nightly snapshot
backups. It may be overkill but I left 10GB of free space on the LVM
volume group for temporary snapshot partitions during backup (compared
to the 4GB that the Proxmox installer sets aside). Overall my ~500GB of
storage is split 60%/40% for data and backups, respectively.
I didn't explore any Linux software RAID options, so I can't offer much
on that, but I'd be very interested in finding out how well that plays
on a Proxmox VE system. Still, I'm happy to share more details of what
I've done if it's helpful to you.
Best regards,
Theron
Post by m***@mWare.caHi Theron, thanks for the anecdote... I am certainly familiar with RAIDs
and their characteristics, my problem is that I'm out of touch with
Linux specifically - spent too much time in FreeBSD lately.
I'm moreso looking for a 'how-to' for mirroring the second drive in my
PVE server... hopefully without any extended downtime or reloading of
the OS being required.
Suggestion for the bare-metal installer - provide RAID1'ing as an
option? I understand the LVM/PV jazz makes it possible to do this after
the fact, but it'd sure be nice to have it from the get-go :)
Myke
Post by Theron T. TroutHi Myke,
I setup a Proxmox VE server with 6 SCSI drivers in RAID 1+0 (stripped
and mirrored). It was a total of 1.2TB and it was blazing fast. We
configured a second, near identical, Proxmox machine and initially
didn't setup the same RAID configuration and it was considerably slower.
The speed difference was most startling with Windows 2003 KVM clients,
particularly during boot. The RAID 1+0 setup was a lot faster than the
other machine. Unfortunately, I don't recall how it's RAID was
initially configured.
Unfortunately, we were under some tight deadlines, so I wasn't able to
do any formal benchmarking before reconfiguring the slower machine. If
I ever get a chance to I'll try to pull some hard numbers, but I doubt
I'll get to tear down one of the two machines any time soon.
Hope that is helpful,
Theron
--
Theron Trout
Principal, Mellonway LLC
800-614-MWAY (6929)
301-358-5050
www.mellonway.com
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