I want to install xcp-ng or proxmox on a separate bootup SSD. I also intend to install all my programs like truenas, portainer etc on that drive as well.
What size SSD would be recommended? 1TB or should I go larger with a 2TB
Secondary storage will go to my RAID configured HD (8)
There’s not much to go on here. Proxmox doesn’t take much room on its own (I assume the same of xcp-ng), so how much space you’ll need depends entirely on what you want to store.
I put most of my containers and VMs on networked storage (anything that doesn’t need to be read fast or that I wouldn’t absolutely need if the network were to go down) and the NFS directory takes up about 1.7TB for 46 image directories (about 1TB of that is for a single VM that needs a lot of storage). That’s a mix of containers and full fat VMs.
I am curious with the VM disks on NFS how is the write performance? Also if the network goes down, so do most of your VMs, potentially with some data corruption as it just unplugged all their drives.
XCP-ng boot drive needs are very small, a 256GB drive has room for me to put several of my thin provisioned VMs on the system drive if I need to do something to my NAS. A 1TB drive would give a lot of room as thin provisioned, if you can afford it, it might be nice to have that much. it also might be a waste of empty space. But the larger the drive, the more terabytes written (within reason) before it wears out, so there’s that.
When I was building my production system, all I could squeeze out of my budget was 256gb for the OS, would have liked to go ~500GB just for the extra room (for emergencies).
I don’t have any hard numbers for performance, but it’s perfectly adequate for most things. In fact on my home network it’s just a gigabit network.
Things like Immich, navidrome, vscode server, calibre, one of my dns servers, and a lot more is all on NFS. Yes, if the network goes down, the services are down (but if the network’s down I can’t access my other network services either). Losing the network or the NAS going down is super infrequent for me. Both are pieces of infrastructure, so I don’t mess with them unnecessarily. Even still I keep good backups.