Proxmox + Rockstor 4

#1

Hiya,
It’s nearly two years ago when I started my adventure with Rockstor.
I’ve been running Rockstor 3 since then and with great pleasure.
The hardware I used was OLD …very OLD …but I like using old hardware.

When Rockstor 4 was in beta I decided to wait. Honestly I totally forgot rockstor since everything was running smooth.

But recently I was donated some hardware …also old but newer than my current rockstor hardware.

So decided for the ‘leap’ :wink:
The hardware; Pentium i3 with 6gb ram.
The hypervisor: initially Proxmox 6 but upgraded to version 7.
The software: the Rockstor 4 iso I found in this forum.

End result: perfectly running Rockstor 4.

Everything went really smooth. Even assigning physical disks to the Rockstor virtual machine.
And as a bonus everything is much faster now than the older hardware.

Cheers,

J.

4 Likes
#2

@dont Thanks for sharing your findings. I don’t think we have yet had a Proxmox install report v4 wise so that’s good to know.
Re:

kudos

So I’m assuming you haven’t checked out our new official downloads page then :slight_smile:

https://rockstor.com/dls.html

Just saying.

2 Likes
#3

Hey Phill,
I have to wait for the harddisks I had ordered so I intended to do a new installation after all.
Didn’t look at the download page. Thanks for pointing me out.

Cheers,

J.

#4

Spurred on by @dont success with Proxmox and Rockstor, I’ve just tried this myself with great results. Never used Proxmox before so was a journey of discovery and learning :slight_smile:

Question to @dont - do you see much performance hit by virtualising compared with bare metal?
Also, the only way I could find (via web search) to add a new drive to the Proxmox environment as storage was via cli. Is there a way to do it in the GUI?

1 Like
#5

@GeoffA: As for a performance hit; Rockstor 3 -> Atom board with 4gb RAM and 4x750gb Samsung disks. Performance was (is) ok.

Comparing bare metal to virtual with my configurations is like pears with apples.
However I can tell you that the webgui is responding much faster with the VM than the baremetal.

As soon as I will receive my harddisks I will do some proper disk i/o test.

3 Likes
#6

Well I have done some research into Proxmox and ended up repurposing a dual core AMD64 box with 8GB RAM to see what the deal is with this hypervisor.
I have used Virtualbox on my laptop many times before with good results, so was interested to see how KVM behaves.
It was a fun learning journey, and that old-ish dual core box is now running 3 VMs - Rockstor 4 and 2 Debian instances as a media server and utility server. This is all just a bit of fun and learning for me, but so far the stability and ease of system management is very comforting.
Performance is more than acceptable for this hardware.

1 Like
#7

Hi @GeoffA sorry was caught up with work lately.

My Proxmox is running Rockstor4 (with Plex rock-on), an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server vm for docker (3 containers running) and an Adguard vm.

No issues at the moment.

I did an iperf with Rockstor4 got an average of 859mbit/sec.

Not sure what I can use to benchmark my current disk setup. Any suggestion?

Cheers,

Johan.

PS @phillxnet I did a reinstall for Rockstor4 with the ISO from the download page :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#8

That’s a respectable number, assuming a 1GB network. I get similar numbers, but generally just use the network graph on the dashboard as an indicator. I also look at the disk activity widget which when expanded shows disk throughput on a per-second basis - that’s good enough for me and I don’t tend to look any deeper or do specific benchmarking.
As long as I get acceptable speeds in real use (ie uploading/downloading files to/from NAS from laptop etc), I’m happy.

EDIT: Just an aside, and more of a rhetorical question, but why does the dashboard network widget always default to ‘lo’? I’d like it to default to the last one viewed which in my case is ‘eth0’.

#9

Yes I have a 1gb network at home.

I was planning to do some testing between several setups of disks. Thus via a qemm virtual disk, attaching a hdd directly to the vm, etc. But everything is working perfect right now so no need for testing.

But i’m still curious :slight_smile:

Have a great day.

#10

Rockstor is running of a typical qemu virtual disk.
I did a passthrough of a whole 2TB spinning disk for data and this worked fine. I tried this live while the VM was running, and it showed up in the Rockstor GUI disks section after a page refresh without having to restart the VM.
I could only create the passthrough using the CLI, could not find a way via the promox GUI (unless I am missing something there). Mind you its only a couple of CLI commands to passthrough the disk.

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