I was setting up a proxmox server at home (my “budget committee” approved the purchase) to replace a few aging servers:<\/p>\n
FreeNAS1 2.5GHz Pentium DualCore 1GB RAM 5x 1.5TB
\nFreeNAS2 2.5GHz Pentium DualCore 2GB RAM 2x 500GB 2x 750GB
\nProxmox1 2.6GHz AMD X2 4GB RAM 1x 160GB
\nFirewall 2.5GHz Pentium DualCore 2GB RAM 1x 160GB
\nEsxi 2.6GHz Pentium DualCore 8GB RAM 2x 1TB<\/p><\/blockquote>\nWith:<\/p>\n
Prox1 Dual 2.4GHz Xeon 32GB RAM 2x 80GB 2.5″ SATA (non-Hotswap) 8x 2TB 3.5″ SATA in RAID50<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So anyway, I had a couple issues with my idea that I needed to fix before making this production:
\n1. 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.
\n2. 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.
\n3. Fdisk does not support GPT. As old-school as I am, I guess I’ll have to ditch fdisk and learn parted.<\/p>\nI 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.<\/p>\n
**NOTE**
\nEXT3\/4 supports up to 16TB of storage per partition!<\/p>\nList Current Mounted Partitions
\ndf -h<\/code><\/p>\nList all disks available
\nfdisk -l<\/code><\/p>\nIn my case I had the RAID listed as \/dev\/sda and the single boot drive as \/dev\/sdb so don’t get these confused!<\/p>\n
Install Parted
\napt-get install parted<\/code><\/p>\nRun Parted on the drive
\nparted \/dev\/sda<\/code><\/p>\nChange the filetype to GPT
\nmklabel gpt<\/code><\/p>\nVerify the disk geometry
\nprint<\/code><\/p>\nNow I created 2x 6TB partitions to see how it would work
\nmkpart primary ext3 0 6000000<\/code>
\nmkpart primary ext3 6000000 12000000<\/code>
\nIt looks like you can run mkpart primary ext3 0 -1 to utilize the entire drive<\/p>\nQuit parted
\nquit<\/code><\/p>\nMake the ext3 filesystem (with 1% reserved)
\nmkfs.ext3 -m1 \/dev\/sda1<\/code>
\nmkfs.ext3 -m1 \/dev\/sda2<\/code><\/p>\nMake the mount directories
\nmkdir \/mnt\/sd1<\/code>
\nmkdir \/mnt\/sd2<\/code><\/p>\nMount the drives
\nmount \/dev\/sda1 \/mnt\/sd1<\/code>
\nmount \/dev\/sda2 \/mnt\/sd2<\/code><\/p>\nVerify the drives are mounted
\ndf -h<\/code>
\nYou should see \/dev\/sda1 and \/dev\/sda2 with 6TB each now<\/p>\nAdd to fstab so they mount on boot
\nnano \/etc\/fstab<\/code><\/p>\n\/dev\/sda1 \/mnt\/sd1 ext3 defaults 0 0
\n\/dev\/sda2 \/mnt\/sd2 ext3 defaults 0 0<\/p><\/blockquote>\nSave and quit<\/p>\n
Reboot and verify all is well!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading Proxmox Parted<\/span>