who’s already greasing the chassis out and banging around with some experiments?
(twice the benchmark of my scapegoat, 2x ram speed, less SATA ports but… close to 1/30th of the power consumption… )
I’m keen to try Nethserver on Zimaboard too - have you had any success?? If so did you do bare iron install or vm with docker or proxmox or kvm? I’m thinking of doing a kvm install and setup.
how are you friends? Wow, so many technologies and I can’t get to know them in my country. As I long for us to get out of this dome, it is difficult to see that technology and if they bring it back, it will cost 2000 times more.
Let me know how it goes if you do the tests.
greetings
This is the first time I’ve heard of Zimaboard and I have to say, I’m impressed by it.
Definitely going to give it a try at some point
Just updating this thread since I’ve received my Zimaboard and had it for a day. So far I’ve connected 1TB of M.2 via the USB3 port with an accessory sourced from Zimaboard. I’ve installed Proxmox directly on the the M.2 SSD because I could not get it to install on the Zimaboard itself which has 16GB eMMC memory and on which its native OS is installed. I didn’t push too hard on why this was so but just fell back to installing the system on the M.2 storage and configuring that to boot first. I am equally inexperienced with Proxmox as a host for KVM/QEMU but have installed KVM/QEMU on Ubuntu in the past (one of the servers I support still runs smeserver as a vm on a host with this configuration) . I started doing an interactive instalation of Nethserver via the web console for Proxmox and all seemed to go well until selecting the target (a 500GB volume allocated in VM setup in Proxmox). It simply doesn’t save the selection. This feels like something to do with either my volume creation selection or a known issue with a workaround. I’ll keep plugging away at it and do some forum digging and then post back here more when I have a working setup.
Hi @Graenet
AFAIK, on similiar hardware, Proxmox has issues using eMMC Storage, especially as boot system. It can format and use the storage later when installed.
Proxmox uses XFS as standard (Just like NethServer), but also can use ZFS from boot. (Better than Debian itself!).
If not further specified, Proxmox wil split up the disk into a LVM (100 GB or 10%), the rest will be LVMthin, intended for VMs, LXCs and so.
Hope this helps.
My 2 cents
Andy
thanks for the input Andy. I thought it might be the eMMC storage that was the issue.
I’ve now got Nethserver installed and working my way through the manual and menus.
I’m exploring a few quirks of installing to Zimaboard. I found this thread Install Proxmox VE on eMMC - iBug which describes a work-around for getting Proxmox onto the eMMC drive but on reflection I decided that was not a good idea anyway - eMMC memory is afterall memory card memory and doesn’t work like a hard disk so could cause problems. After playing around with nethserver as a vm on proxmox I decided to try a bare bones install. This works fine with one disk once you select the disk correctly in the target storage area, but it does not work well in interactive mode or manual mode for installing a RAID setup, at least with the two disks I have. They are not identical, but that isn’t the problem (their geometry is close enough) - the problem is I have an NVRAM disk connected via USB3 and a SATAIII SSD connected to the SATA port as well as the USB stick install media. The correct drives are not automatically selected and the USB installer gets in between. I think I need to get a second SATA SSD to make it work cleanly, so I’ll try that next.
Personal opinion
eMMC for server environment is no good “production” storage. Even in firewall environment, if a lot of writings are required as standard operation, eMMC is simply too slow and too unreliable
Anywaym eMMC is still flash storage, and sometimes, for some tasks, could be suitable (for instance, Truenas could boot from a USB flash drive or an eMMC, only updating system/version this storage is written).
You’re gonna loose quite of the compactness of this arrangement, but you can still consider (instead of a network adapter) to connect to PCIe Slot some SATA HBA.
Hi @pike
Not quite!
The older FreeNAS could boot from a USB or eMMC, but NOT TrueNAS!
At least a small SSD / HD for system is required…
The running joke is that VMWare ESXi could use it (Depending on Version, etc., ESXi CAN boot / run of a USB…), but due to it’s restricted hardware list, it can’t effectively use it, won’t even “see” the eMMC.
Proxmox can only “see” eMMC after installation, so not suitable as a system disk.
My 2 cents
Andy
Source
You do not need an SSD boot device, but we discourage using a spinner or a USB stick. We do not recommend installing TrueNAS on a single disk or striped pool unless you have a good reason to do so. You can install and run TrueNAS without any data devices, but we strongly discourage it
.
USB / eMMC would be dead within weeks, if not days!
Anyway, this single quote is uncorrect?
The TrueNAS (and FreeNAS before it, back to the release of 9.3 in 2014) boot device is a live ZFS pool. There isn’t a great deal of write activity to it other than updates and config changes, but neither is it the “load everything into a RAMdisk” arrangement of m0n0wall that previous releases had used. It hasn’t been a read-only device in normal operation for nine years. So, while Free/TrueNAS technically might be able to use it as a boot device, it’d be a very bad idea and would almost certainly die horribly in very short order.
I’m not sure what such storage really is suited for–OpenWRT, maybe? Or some other kind of firewall distro that logs (if at all) to a different device.
Technically, it’s as correct as the fact that you CAN jump from a high bridge, even without any parachute or Bungee equipment - it’s just not really advisable!
Killing a USB within days isn’t advisable either!
And spinners are really too slow, you can get more timeouts than data!
Without other options, the ZFS caching / indexing / etc are all done on the spinner, and that is tooooo slow!
but also OPNsense can use such storage for system. Logs, etc are kept then in RAM Disk until reboot.
OpenWRT systems use a lot of “flash” in the wild, really minimal systems!
My 2 cents
Andy
