Recommended ZFS Setup

[OzoneSea]

I'm setting up a new homelab server using an old Dell PowerEdge R730 w/ 2x Intel Xeon E5-2699A v4 (22 cores @ 2.4 GHz) and 192 GB ECC DDR4-2133. I plan on using Proxmox to set up a few of VMs; one for web services (i.e., git repo, Home Assistant, Jellyfish, etc.), one for game servers (i.e. Minecraft), and another as a development environment. It will also be a cloud storage server and NAS. The drive setup will be 2x Samsung 2 TB SSD and 6x HGST 12 TB HDD, all of them SAS 12 Gb/s and refurbished/used. The HDD I know I want in a RAIDz2 configuration (or, alternatively, 2 RAIDz1 in a single vdev). The question is what I should do with the SSDs. I was thinking of two ways to use them, both in mirror:

1. As just another storage vdev that will contain the VM images which will be regularly backed up to the HDD vdev
2. As a L2ARC/SLOG vdev for use with the HDD vdev

If 1, what would the recommended ARC size, record size, sector size, etc. be? Same question for 2. Are neither if these setups recommended? If not, what would be the alternative? Or would a hardware RAID setup be preferable in this scenario?

[LIGISTX]

10 hours ago, OzoneSea said:

I'm setting up a new homelab server using an old Dell PowerEdge R730 w/ 2x Intel Xeon E5-2699A v4 (22 cores @ 2.4 GHz) and 192 GB ECC DDR4-2133. I plan on using Proxmox to set up a few of VMs; one for web services (i.e., git repo, Home Assistant, Jellyfish, etc.), one for game servers (i.e. Minecraft), and another as a development environment. It will also be a cloud storage server and NAS. The drive setup will be 2x Samsung 2 TB SSD and 6x HGST 12 TB HDD, all of them SAS 12 Gb/s and refurbished/used. The HDD I know I want in a RAIDz2 configuration (or, alternatively, 2 RAIDz1 in a single vdev). The question is what I should do with the SSDs. I was thinking of two ways to use them, both in mirror:

1. As just another storage vdev that will contain the VM images which will be regularly backed up to the HDD vdev
2. As a L2ARC/SLOG vdev for use with the HDD vdev

If 1, what would the recommended ARC size, record size, sector size, etc. be? Same question for 2. Are neither if these setups recommended? If not, what would be the alternative? Or would a hardware RAID setup be preferable in this scenario?

Use the 2 SSD’s as a ZFS mirror as the Proxmox boot device. You can install/run VM’s from Proxmox boot drives. 
 

This would give your Proxmox host redundancy, as well as your VM’s and containers. From there, setup backups as you choose to your spinning rust (you want 1 Z2 dev, you probably don’t want dual Z1 vdevs). 
 

When installing Proxmox, select ZFS mirror and select the two SSD’s as part of the mirror.