New build, unsure how to layout disks for VM's and Containers

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Hi Everyone

 

Long time NAS and ESXi user, but first time Unraid user looking for some advice in setting up my disks and what structure and layout works. Hope this is the right category for this.

 

At the moment I have:

• 2 X 500GB SSD's
• 2 X 1TB SSD's
• 2 X 1TB HDD (which are kinda spare and I just chucked in, there is probably more)

 

Open to buying more disks if it makes sense.

 

My planned use of this machine is to mostly run docker containers and a few VM's as I transition over from having a lot of VM's on the old ESXi server.

 

I do not plan to have a lot of storage on it at this time as I have a separate NAS for that, although I probably keep the data for the smaller things on here. For the larger things like Emby I will map that over to the data on the NAS (as I currently do with the Emby VM I run)

 

I am trying to understand what the best way to structure the disks is for these usages. My original plan from my understanding was to have a couple of cache pools, each made up of a pair of SSD's (for redundancy) where my VM's and dockers were split between them (maybe VM's on the bigger one and containers on the smaller one, but have since realised you have to have an array for the cache to sit in front of).

 

I could just use all the SSD's and no HDD's as part of the array in Unraid and store everything there, but it sounds like that has performance issues with the array so that would have a performance penalty.

 

I'm not expecting my dockers and VM's to get too big, maybe 500GB total including data (little hard to tell, I have a number of VM's that have a lot of overhead).

 

Happy to take suggestions and ideas, just looking to see what others think might make sense.

 

Thanks

 

Craig

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To add to this, the level of protection I was looking for was probably only single disk redundancy for any data stored. The option to go to two disk redundancy is nice, but as parity and duplicate drives isn't a backup, anything important would be backed up onto another system.

 

Thanks