I am refreshing my XCP-ng servers and the vendor mistakenly sent me servers with Dell PERC H330 storage controllers. I have 3 Samsung PM1643a 3.84TB drives to use for VHD storage on each server. I don’t have a separate NAS. I run the VMs on direct attached storage and replicate the VMs to the second server for fail-over. I should get the correct controllers (and am sure I will), but I started thinking about software RAID instead.
Q1.
My first thought was to use ZFS. After a bit of reading, it seems that running a VHD (CoW system) on ZFS (CoW) causes this write amplification problem and this is not a good idea. Am I understanding this correctly? Or can this be avoided?
Q2.
I did some reading on md RAID for Linux and it seems that if I am using SSDs with Power Loss Protection, I could do this as a viable option and the performance difference will be negligible. Is this correct?