poinck

I want to transfer 80 TB of data to another locatio . I already have the drives for it. The idea is to copy everything to it, fly it to the target and use or copy the data on/to the server.

What filesystem would you use and would you use a raid configuration? Currently I lean towards 8 single disk filesystems on the 10 TB drives with ext4, because it is simple. I considered ZFS because of the possiblity to scrub at the target destination and/or pool all drives. But ZFS may not be available at the target.

There is btrfs which should be available everywhere because it is in mainline linux and ZFS is not. But from my knowledge btrfs would require lvm to pool disks together like zfs can do natively.

Pooling the drives would also be a problem if one disk gets lost during transit. If I have everything on 8 single disks at least the remaining data can be used at the target and they only have to wait for the missing data.

I like to read about your opinions or practical experience with similar challanges.

Hi, I have an old Dell server I want to repurpose as a storage server and I decided to use zfs. I have read that gradual increases are best done with mirrored vdevs and only if I want to max out, I can choose Z2. What are your experiences in practice?

I like to go the gradual increase route because I cannot afford to maximize from the beginning. I like to start with ~10TB usable space. The server has at least 8 free drive bays. Should I go with a mirror as my first vdev or go 6x3TB with Z2? Ideally I want to be able to add more vdevs to the same pool in the future.

I am also curious whether it is a bad idea to have an uneven pool with mixed vdev types, the first being mirror and the second Z2. Will the vdevs eventually even out over time because zfs is a CoW filesystem?

I have a room with 30 thinclients currently running Windows with the possibility to open RDP sessions.

The current setup using VMWare is slow even for 2D content. That is why I want to replace it with Proxmox. What can I expect? I suspect the current setup is using SAN, I want to go ZFS on local drives.

I experimented in a homelab on KVM to see how fast the VMs can become. With 8 cores Google Earth becomes somewhat usable over RDP. But imagine 30 students using it on the same VM. The VM is Debian 13 btw.

I also experiemented with spice and 3D acceleration, but it works only locally and does not support multiple logins. What other options do I have. Even when I setup the VM to use virgl it uses software rendering over RDP. I thought of replacing the Windows on the thinclients with Linux, but then I would need individual VMs for every student and a secure spice session. Is that even possible? I would need a potent GPU in the server, maybe more than one. Is a 64 core CPU and 512 GB RAM enough for 30 students?

I've read that proxmox uses temporary .vv files for noVNC in the browser. I hope this can be setup permanently to be accessible over the network.

Any advice or new ideas are welcome!

What are your experiences with btrbk? I have found it recently and noticed, the last contributon was 2 years ago. Is it still a healthy project or should one stick to other backup solutions for btrfs snapshots?