Newbie Home User - How To Setup Storage

[Rob Jarratt]

I am a Proxmox newbie and also not an experienced Linux administrator. I just want to host a few VMs on a new machine I have set up at home for this purpose, so nothing enterprise grade, just a standard consumer desktop machine with a single NVMe drive.

I installed Proxmox, accepting all the defaults. I then wanted to import a VM from my old HyperV hypervisor but found I didn't have the disk space to copy over the files to my new hardware. This turned out to be because the bulk of the space on the SSD seems to be in a logical volume that, apparently, I can't access as if it was a normal disk volume.

I think the reason I couldn't access the logical volume as if it was a normal file structured disk volume is because it is a "thin" volume. I guess there could be a number of ways to fix this, assuming I am right. I would love to know which is the best strategy. I tried the last one and failed.

1. Install Proxmox with different storage options in the first place. If so what would be sensible for a very simple home setup?
2. Find a way to copy the VHDs to the thin volume, is there a way to do this?
3. Try to make the thin volume have a file structure. I tried this and failed. Below I explain what I did.

What I did to try to change the pve-data volume was the following:

I attempted to format the volume using the command:

mkfs.ext4 /dev/pve/data

I then added the following line to /etc/fstab

/dev/pve/data /data ext4 0 1

If I mount after booting then this works and I appear to have a file structured directory at /data. But if I attempt to reboot the machine with this line in fstab it times out and drops to a command prompt for me to repair the configuration. I have to remove the line in fstab, the machine will boot successfully and then I can mount afterwards.

Clearly I don't really know what I am doing here and I suspect some simple advice for a straightforward home server with no need for enterprise features will set me right.

I would welcome any suggestions please.

Thanks

Rob

 

[Kingneutron]

Clearly you know just enough to be dangerous.

You're not supposed to format the lvm-thin storage. It's a Logical Volume that proxmox uses for VM disks and not accessible at the command prompt. You're lucky you didn't experience data loss.

Your best bet at this point is to reinstall, so it sets up the LVM correctly again.

I suggest you read the official docs and start with something like this:


https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=proxmox+course

https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#installation_installer

https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapter_lvm

https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapter_storage


Since you admit that you're a newbie and not sure what you're doing, ASK FOR HELP before you go tossing off format-filesystem commands.

 

[Rob Jarratt]

Thanks for the response. It was a fresh installation so I wasn't at any risk of losing anything because there was nothing to be lost, and I felt reasonably safe in experimenting. In fact I have since reinstalled from scratch, ready to try again.

I had already tried reading those chapters, but I got a bit lost in what the documentation was saying, because I don't have the depth of linux and LVM knowledge required to understand the implications of what it was telling me. So I wasn't able to find the answer to my question about the best way to make a file structured data area big enough for me to copy the VHDs over before I import them to proxmox.

However, I think that may be the wrong approach anyway. I am going to switch tack and and just mount the source location of the VHDs and import them directly from the mounted CIFS volume.