I was setting up a proxmox server at home (my “budget committee” approved the purchase) to replace a few aging servers:
FreeNAS1 2.5GHz Pentium DualCore 1GB RAM 5x 1.5TB
FreeNAS2 2.5GHz Pentium DualCore 2GB RAM 2x 500GB 2x 750GB
Proxmox1 2.6GHz AMD X2 4GB RAM 1x 160GB
Firewall 2.5GHz Pentium DualCore 2GB RAM 1x 160GB
Esxi 2.6GHz Pentium DualCore 8GB RAM 2x 1TB
With:
Prox1 Dual 2.4GHz Xeon 32GB RAM 2x 80GB 2.5″ SATA (non-Hotswap) 8x 2TB 3.5″ SATA in RAID50
I think the IPMI alone makes this worth while. Current power draw for the old machines is around 440 watts. Current draw for the replacement server is 415 watts, but that’s without much load. So power savings will be negligable.
So anyway, I had a couple issues with my idea that I needed to fix before making this production:
1. Proxmox uses GRUB bootloader, which means I cannot have a boot drive larger than 2TB in size. My fix was to install a pair of 2.5″ 80GB laptop drives to be the boot drives.
2. Proxmox will not install on a software or motherboard RAID from the standalone ISO. I set the BIOS to boot off the laptop drives only, same issues applied. I had to install proxmox with the RAID card removed from the system, and on a single card.
3. Fdisk does not support GPT. As old-school as I am, I guess I’ll have to ditch fdisk and learn parted.
I know I could have just carved out an additional LUN or even partitioned before installing proxmox to fix the first issue. But I wanted a single LUN for storage only, and it should be the entire 12TB raw. As far as the second issue, there is an install path that allows you to install debian before proxmox, which would then allow you to setup on the soft raid. I’m still tempted to go this route as it’s generally better to have two drives instead of just one. As I’m currently running proxmox 2.Beta, I think I still have a little time to decide.
**NOTE**
EXT3/4 supports up to 16TB of storage per partition!
List Current Mounted Partitions
df -h
List all disks available
fdisk -l
In my case I had the RAID listed as /dev/sda and the single boot drive as /dev/sdb so don’t get these confused!
Install Parted
apt-get install parted
Run Parted on the drive
parted /dev/sda
Change the filetype to GPT
mklabel gpt
Verify the disk geometry
print
Now I created 2x 6TB partitions to see how it would work
mkpart primary ext3 0 6000000
mkpart primary ext3 6000000 12000000
It looks like you can run mkpart primary ext3 0 -1 to utilize the entire drive
Quit parted
quit
Make the ext3 filesystem (with 1% reserved)
mkfs.ext3 -m1 /dev/sda1
mkfs.ext3 -m1 /dev/sda2
Make the mount directories
mkdir /mnt/sd1
mkdir /mnt/sd2
Mount the drives
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sd1
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sd2
Verify the drives are mounted
df -h
You should see /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 with 6TB each now
Add to fstab so they mount on boot
nano /etc/fstab
/dev/sda1 /mnt/sd1 ext3 defaults 0 0
/dev/sda2 /mnt/sd2 ext3 defaults 0 0
Save and quit
Reboot and verify all is well!