Recommended storage setup for application and virtualization server?

[romeozor]

Hey there,

I really tried my best to find a suitable category for my question about “how should I approach storage for my server I’m planning to build”, but I’m not familiar with the forum and I really want to get the conversation going before Black Friday. Please move/direct me to the correct section if here is inappropriate.

I’m in the process of building a server. First time. Everything is new to me. My jump off point are the following components:
Threadripper 1920X
ASRock X399M Taichi

So far I’ve purchased 4x
KINGSTON 16GB 2666MHz DDR4 ECC KSM26ED8/16ME

I’m a C# and .NET developer, so I’d like to run both Windows and Linux systems. Windows Server(s) for DC, AD, WSUS, IIS, MSSQL, Azure DevOps. Also want a good Docker host for .NET Core (.NET 5).

My problem is that every time I search for “ideal server storage setup”, I get stuff about NAS and Cloud storage. Also when it comes to redundancy, I know RAID, but “omg RAID is so outdated, use ZFS, it’s all the rage”, but “ZFS is very complicated, don’t start with that”. Soooo… what now?

The motherboard has 3 M.2 slots. I thought I could get 2x 1TB NVME sticks, something “enterprise grade” and put them in RAID 1, run the systems from those. Not sure what to do with the 3rd M.2, I was thinking using it for the build agents to build the applications on.

I don’t know where to look for these “enterprise grade” NVME SSDs thought. Kingston was the only straight forward site where they said this is the only thing we have for your specs: DC1000B M.2 NVMe SSD.
Looked at ADATA, Crucial, but they don’t really offer anything “server”. Samsung and Intel Optane are not really what I want to spend on.

I was also thinking of having 2 or 4 SATA3 SSDs in RAID1/RAID10 for hosting databases, Docker volumes.

Also traditional HDDs for backups, snapshots.

Proxmox is a very popular answer for host OS, I’d host Windows and Linux guests as needed.

Any help would be appreciated.

[zxmth]

Sounds like you’re on a decent track here. I run a Proxmox server with a 1950X and a X399 Taichi and it works great. I boot off a single NVMe drive and then use 4 Samsung SSD’s for VM image storage. Setting up ZFS with proxmox is actually pretty straight forward but you may really appreciate some of the videos on the Intermit.Tech YouTube channel. I found a lot of his videos really helpful when I was exploring setting up Proxmox. This one in particular talks about hardware and goes into hard drives as well. Search around his channel and I’ll bet you’ll find a number of videos on Proxmox and ZFS that will help.

Home Networking: 100TB 10Gbit Server - What hardware do you need?

Cheers.