free Starwind x Proxmox SAN storage plugin

[itsnota2ma]

@mihsu81 Thanks for the help! The PegaProx helped a lot. I did notice it is missing the import tool. Maybe there is a plugin??

 

[alma21]

Anyone have any technical info on the starwind storage plug in? I looked at it on their website and forum, but just high level marketing info, no real technical details on how it works. I use 3PAR FC storage with all my proxmox clusters, and needless to say, if there is a way to enable VM level snapshots on LVM storage, its a huge win.

Sean

Hi,

the plugin uses a LVM thin Pool per VM disk(s) with an initial Pool size which gets autoextended (activation/thin_pool_autoextend_threshold & thin_pool_autoextend_percent) via dmeventd and it ensures also proper cluster locking

similiar like discussed here in P.S.:

A

Post in thread 'What about LVM+qcow2'

Jul 1, 2024

Hi, I have also looked at this.
I'll try it soon, and compare vs gfs2 && ocfs2.

The only diff vs ovirt, is that proxmox use internal snapshot, I don't known it's playing fine with qcow2 on blockdevice. (That's also mean than we can't shrink blockdevice after delete of the snapshot)

https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4160

Hi spirit,

your qcow2 over LVM implementation looks promising - esp. the qmeventd daemon way sounds like a smooth solution - I think this is the missing piece for an all-in-one >host based< shared block storage / SAN solution with similiar...

• alma21

• 

only 2 concerns on my side:
- who is officially supporting this plugin (Starwind ?) for production environments
- making/monitoring extensions of ev. hundreds of VM disks/(thin pools) dependent on one daemon -> maybe also risky ... at least it must be add. monitored .. also ev. VG "exhaustion" ..... in a write heavy environment

 

[hstende]

I hope proxmox will add a plugin like this from starwind into it baseinstall. With a supported plugin like this it will be easier for migrating from vmware to proxmox

 

[alma21]

I fully agree !

 

[Daniel Wagner]

+1

 

[Gilberto Ferreira]

I totally agree with that.

 

[damiengm]

only 2 concerns on my side:
- who is officially supporting this plugin (Starwind ?) for production environments
- making/monitoring extensions of ev. hundreds of VM disks/(thin pools) dependent on one daemon -> maybe also risky ... at least it must be add. monitored .. also ev. VG "exhaustion" ..... in a write heavy environment

I am interested in this too, as a VMware refugee. I've setup iSCSI and will have to have alot of Thick provisioned disks. This should be implemented so it's one more reason for VMware refugees to consider Proxmox, given most have or are coming off 3 or 5 year Essential licenses, and that storage prices are now realllly tight and most can't get more storage to make Ceph disks and would like to reuse their SAN/iSCSI
Regards
Damien

 

[itsnota2ma]

I am interested in this too, as a VMware refugee. I've setup iSCSI and will have to have alot of Thick provisioned disks. This should be implemented so it's one more reason for VMware refugees to consider Proxmox, given most have or are coming off 3 or 5 year Essential licenses, and that storage prices are now realllly tight and most can't get more storage to make Ceph disks and would like to reuse their SAN/iSCSI
Regards
Damien

Damien,
I struggled with iSCSI and my Equallogic SAN. I recently moved to a Ubiquiti ENAS, which is ZFS and supports NFS for thin provisioning and snapshots. It also supports iSCSI, which I tested the connection, but decided on NFS. What is nice, is even though it is NFS, Ubiquiti has a setting to convert it to block storage, just like iSCSI, so the NFS is not accessible through browsing, a.k.a., the ProxMox host controls the share.

Also, when you bring over your thick provisioned VM's from VMware to ProxMox, there are some shell commands to convert them to thin provisioned,

 

[LnxBil]

Also, when you bring over your thick provisioned VM's from VMware to ProxMox, there are some shell commands to convert them to thin provisioned,

That does not work like that. If you have a block storage for your VM, the block storage itself handels thin provisioning, e.g. if you have a disk with a lot of zeros on the disk, they will not be written. In the VM, you only have to check the discard flag for the VM disk. Afterwards, the OS can just issue a TRIM command over different tools like fstrim or Optimize-Volume to free up the backend storage of the already freed VM blocks.