Resolved Raid1 with 2 NVMe SSD and 10 HD (Hetzner SX 134)

[Klabund69]

Hi,
I have rented an SX134 with 2 10 HDDs from Hetzner and want to set it up with Ubuntu 22.04 and Plesk.
After I bundled the HDDs into 5 Raid1 arrays, the subsequent Plesk installation set up a different configuration with Raid6.
The resulting storage capacity of the 10 HDDs is only approx. 9 TB, as Plesk creates all HDDs with a partition of just under 1 TB.
However, with the 10 HDDs with Raid1 I should end up with approx. 70 GB.

Basic question: How can I get Plesk to support this configuration and bundle the 10 HDs into 1 or 5 Raid1 arrays?

Options:
- Automatic installation of Ubuntu by the robot with the option "Ubuntu 22.04 + Plesk" ?
This will reinstall Ubuntu - Eresult as described above.
But then Plesk takes Raid6 again and makes a partition of 1 TB per HD - right?

- Manual configuration of Raid1 with all 10 HDDs in ONE raid array and define in the fstab. Then installation of Plesk - by Robot or manually?
Does PLESK then really follow the entries in the fstab?
Or can Plesk set the configuration of the HBBs and Raid1 during the manual installation?

Unfortunately there is a lot of information about how to bind 2 disks to a Raid1 array and Plesk does this automatically. But nowhere is there information on how to deal with a Rad1 and 10 HDs.

Thank you very much!
Klabund69

 

[Peter Debik]

Plesk has absolutely no influence on your hard disk partitions. It cannot partition disks and it does not partition disks. It neither controls RAID. It installs to the / path, but it does so regardless of what disk configuration you have.

All disk configurations are purely operating system and hardware tasks (e.g. if you are using a hardware RAID controller). It is impossible that plesk changes RAID or disk configurations.

 

[UHolthausen]

Hello

If you want your own raid configuration, the only way is via installimage from hetzner, where it is possible to configure raid.
See here: Installimage - Hetzner Docs

Once the operating system has been installed, install plesk manually using plesk web installer: Plesk Web Installer

 

[Klabund69]

Thank you very much!
That has already given me a lot of clarity.
The question remains as to how best to bundle the 10 HDDs in Raid1 arrays: as 1 array with 10 HDs/partitions or as 5 arrays with 2 disks/partitions each?

 

[UHolthausen]

Hello

my two servers have only four hard disks, it is possible that with 10 hard disks there are more possibilities to configure raid. Or it would be advisable to install your own image, this is the last menu item in the start screen of installimage.

 

[Peter Debik]

@Klabund69 May I ask what you need 10 HDDs for if you are not aware of the options and RAID levels you can have? For one I wonder what controller you have in your server to operate a RAID with 10 HDDs. Then I read things like

Raid1 with all 10 HDDs in ONE raid array

??? How can you mirror more than 1 disk in RAID 1?

With the number of hard disks you have in a single server, the first thing is to not use software RAID, but hardware RAID, because else the load for RAID management on the CPU can become a problem, especially when other processes need your CPU badly. There are only little applications for a 10-disk-setup, and the ones that exist like utterly large databases or video collections require a lot of RAM and CPU, too.

Also, with the number of disks I'd rather consider RAID 10, so that you get the best from both worlds: Stripe sets to double the speed and hot swapable redundancy by mirroring the array.

What type of application do you plan that requires the enormous capacity of the server and what will be the role of Plesk in this setup?

 

[Klabund69]

Thank you Peter.
My intentions:
I want to run about 20 Nextclouds on this server. They are on the Raid1 connected two NVMe SSDs, but only the system files and the databases and Plesk.
The data directories are on the HDs. I am already using this configuration very successfully on other servers.
This allows me to use the speed of the fast NVMe SSDs and store the rarely accessed data on the HDs.
Videos are also stored in the Nextclouds, so there is a lot of data but relatively little access.
The server has 128GB RAM.
As far as I know, Raid1 can be created with several partitions per array. So I put one partition on each disk. Do I form Raid1 arrays - one array with the 10 partitions or 5 arrays with 2 partitions each?
I would prefer an array in which 5 are mirrored.

 

[Peter Debik]

Partitions have nothing to do with the RAID configuration. RAID is a hardware level configuration. An optimal RAID appears to the operating system as one disk. It really does not matter how many partitions you put on it, because the operating system considers this as one single disk. it does not know whether you are using RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 or whatever. The advantage of running several arrays could be that if one fails for whatever reason, the others are not affected. I'd also consider to not run such a configuration at all, but instead distribute the NCs onto separate servers. This is much safer, because they will be located in different buildings or racks, and for cases like power supply failures you'll stay online with all websites but the ones affected by the outage.

Anyway, I'll move the topic into "Open Topics", because all that is not a Plesk question, but purely business strategy.

 

[Klabund69]

Yes, of course, it is now a question of hardware strategy.
We have learned a lot about this issue.

But we finally managed it with the help of Hetzner support:
Now the SX 134 server from Hetzner is running with 2 NVe SSDs in a Raid 1 array for system and database. The 10 HDDs with 16 TB each are running in a Raid10 (!) array with 70 TB of storage space for the Nextclouds data.
There are now 20 Nextclouds running on this server. And it works very well.
Thanks for the help!