Finally managed to get my hands on 2x1TB NVMe’s. Budgets are tight these days … :-) They are Crucial P310 … hope they are reliable, although I suspect nowhere near Samsung stuff.
I have a little Proxmox installation running a VM on a 256GB NVMe, which as you can imagine is tight. Is there a way of cloning this installing on one of the new NVMes?
Reason why I have 2x new NVMe is that I want to eventually get myself to Proxmox HA, so that the two machines (two little Optiplex 5070, one of which has the 256GB install) provide me with redundancy.
First thing is to clone the 256GB install to the larger NVMe. Would it be an idea to go this way: a) install 1TB new NVMe on spare Optiplex b) install Proxmox on this new machine c) find a way to replicate the whole 256GB install on the second machine (need to read the docs to see if/how this can happen) d) once second machine is up and running as a clone, remove machine with 256GB (current machine) and install the 1TB NVMe. e) do the same above process the other way around.
Do you think this will work or am I going to hit a wall? Is there a simpler way of doing this?
That depends on what level of HA you want to end up with.
If you want proper HA, you’ll want to plan on adding a (small, like a Raspberry Pi) third node for quorum. If you are already taking backups and you just want “I can restore on the second system” then it’s slightly simpler, but mostly the same process:
If you’re planning on proper HA, I’d strongly advise having the proxmox installation on a second small drive on each node and leaving your 1tb drives as data only.
This article half-explains one option for a two node setup (zfs replication), which is functional but not ideal. If you want to get your feet wet with Ceph then I can give you some pointers.
Yeah, but these little Optiplex machines only take one NVMe at a time I think. In your article it sounds like you have a tiny NVMe drive for Proxmox and an SSD (on the SATA port presumably) for the storage. Is this right? I think the Optiplex 5070 allows both NVMe and SSD at the same time, but not 100% sure.
I personally would go the other way, use your nvme for storage and have a second small drive for proxmox since that part doesn’t really need speed. That said, if you go with zfs replication it doesn’t matter; just have the one nvme drive that holds the proxmox install and the storage pool. Separate drive only matters for Ceph.