Installing Proxmox guests or host on a RAID array

[blazemonkey]

I've had Proxmox installed along with 4-5 vz guests and 2 KVM guests on a single 7200rpm WD black hard drive for a few years now. It's been working well, but I always notice the I/O delay hovering between 2-20% when the guests are busy, and it is noticeable performance wise. I'm hoping to bring that down a bit and add some redundancy by setting up a RAID 1 array.

I'm going to pick up a couple WD 7200rpm RE drives today to set the array up. At first I was just going to copy the whole thing (hosts and guests) over to the RAID 1, but now I'm thinking I might benefit from leaving the host on the single drive and install the guests on the RAID 1. It would certainly be easier.. The machine typically serves 2-4 users at any time.

What do you guys think i should do?

Note that all the drives mentioned above will be for OS, and applications only. None of these drives will be used for actual mass storage, I have a separate NAS4Free box running a RAID-Z2 setup for that.

 

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I've had Proxmox installed along with 4-5 vz guests and 2 KVM guests on a single 7200rpm WD black hard drive for a few years now. It's been working well, but I always notice the I/O delay hovering between 2-20% when the guests are busy, and it is noticeable performance wise. I'm hoping to bring that down a bit and add some redundancy by setting up a RAID 1 array.

I'm going to pick up a couple WD 7200rpm RE drives today to set the array up. At first I was just going to copy the whole thing (hosts and guests) over to the RAID 1, but now I'm thinking I might benefit from leaving the host on the single drive and install the guests on the RAID 1. It would certainly be easier.. The machine typically serves 2-4 users at any time.

What do you guys think i should do?

Note that all the drives mentioned above will be for OS, and applications only. None of these drives will be used for actual mass storage, I have a separate NAS4Free box running a RAID-Z2 setup for that.

I use proxmox with raid just fine. Quite a while ago I wrote up a VERY long post on the proxmox forums on how to set this up (detailed, for a non-linux user). Poke around over there & you should be able to find it. I believe my handle there is the same as here iIRC.