Melange

Running ProxMox and many VMs.

VMs

Hive - AbtDev1 - Bandit - Positronic - Morosoph - Glam - Matryoshka - Hoard

Copy media

On melange, you can plug microSSDs into the melange hub, and you can also reach samba shares.

So direct copy from shares to microSSD is possible without 1Gbit network bottleneck.

sudo su -
mount /media
rsync --progress /spiceflow/... /media/...

Turns out that's not much of a bottleneck yet... my best cards were only getting 100MB/s write speed... test more cards maybe! In the meantime, just use Nautilus on cast.

Reading should def be faster though, if you need to copy from microSSD to shares.

Hardware

• LSI Broadcom SAS 9300-8i 8-port 12Gb/s SATA+SAS PCI-Express 3.0 Low Profile Host Bus Adapter: Pass through of 8 drive connections to hive to use for its storage

• 4 SAS connections on mobo, with a SAS-to-SATA cable; make sure to turn on "SATA mode" for U.2 in BIOS; all passed through to hive

• 4 SATA ssd connections on mobo; 3 are passed through to hive

• 1 TB M.2 nvme

/dev/mapper/pve-root / # /dev/nvme0n1p3
/boot/efi /dev/nvme0n1p2

Passthroughs

We pass the LSI PCI-E board (and its 8 ssd drives), the 4 SATA SSD drives, and the 4 U.2 SSD drives to Hive, for storage management.

LSI PCI-E board passthru

TODO (I don't remember)

SSD drives passthru

• Identify drives on melange

 🌐 m@melange  [~] sudo lsblk |awk 'NR==1{print $0" DEVICE-ID(S)"}NR>1{dev=$1;printf $0" ";system("find /dev/disk/by-id -lname \"*"dev"\" -printf \" %p\"");print "";}'|grep -v -E 'part|lvm'
NAME                         MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT DEVICE-ID(S)
sdh                            8:112  0 931.5G  0 disk   /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x500a0751e5a2fb01 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2122E5A2FB01
sdi                            8:128  0 931.5G  0 disk   /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2122E5A2FD56 /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x500a0751e5a2fd56
sdj                            8:144  1 931.5G  0 disk   /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2122E5A313D2 /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x500a0751e5a313d2
sdk                            8:160  1 931.5G  0 disk   /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2122E5A313D6 /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x500a0751e5a313d6
sdl                            8:176  1 931.5G  0 disk   /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2117E59AAE1B /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x500a0751e59aae1b
sdm                            8:192  1 931.5G  0 disk   /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x500a0751e5a2e131 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2121E5A2E131
sdn                            8:208  1 931.5G  0 disk   /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x500a0751e5a3009a /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2122E5A3009A
nvme0n1                      259:0    0 931.5G  0 disk   /dev/disk/by-id/nvme-eui.002538510141169d /dev/disk/by-id/nvme-Samsung_SSD_970_EVO_Plus_1TB_S4EWNJ0N107994E

• Use qm set to pass them all to hive (VM 104)

sudo qm set 104 -scsi11 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2122E5A2FD56
sudo qm set 104 -scsi12 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2122E5A2FB01
sudo qm set 104 -scsi13 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2122E5A313D2
sudo qm set 104 -scsi14 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2122E5A313D6
sudo qm set 104 -scsi15 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2117E59AAE1B
sudo qm set 104 -scsi16 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2121E5A2E131
sudo qm set 104 -scsi17 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-CT1000MX500SSD1_2122E5A3009A

# check
sudo cat /etc/pve/qemu-server/104.conf

(restart hive)

Upgrade

Proxmox uses apt for upgrades.

6.3 > 7.0

I followed this, for the most part.

• Update all VMS
• Shut down all VMS
• Fully update current version's apt packages - this took me from 6.3 to 6.4, a necessary first step.

sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade

• Upgrade basic apt sources list from buster to bullseye

sudo sed -i 's/buster\/updates/bullseye-security/g;s/buster/bullseye/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
# instructions discuss pve-enterprise but i needed to change pve-no-subscription instead - but same exact steps, otherwise
# ie, leave this commented out, but might as well set to bullseye
# /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list
# and update this to bullseye
# /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-no-subscription.list

• Perform the full upgrade to bullseye / pm 7

sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade

• Reboot

Melange VMs come back nicely. The only snag I caught was that bandit samba shares don't mount (it comes up too fast perhaps?). So restart them then restart qbt nox:

mh-setup-samba-shares
sudo service qbittorrent-nox restart

Looking good!

apt dist-upgrade

I did another round of `apt update && apt dist-upgrade` without stopping containers and it went fine (with bandit fixup still needed tho).

Installation

Add samba shares manually

sudo emacs /etc/fstab # and paste samba stanza from another machine
sudo emacs /root/samba_credentials
sudo mkdir /spiceflow && sudo chmod 777 /spiceflow
🌐 m@melange  [~] mkdir /spiceflow/bitpost
🌐 m@melange  [~] mkdir /spiceflow/grim
🌐 m@melange  [~] mkdir /spiceflow/mack
🌐 m@melange  [~] mkdir /spiceflow/reservoir
🌐 m@melange  [~] mkdir /spiceflow/sassy
🌐 m@melange  [~] mkdir /spiceflow/safe

Now you can mount em up and hang em high!