Advice about shared storage

[jparis]

Hi,

I have a Proxmox 6 install with a couple of 240GB mirrored SSDs for booting and Proxmox, a couple of 2 TB mirrored SSDs for containers and 4 2TB SSDs in Raid5 config for storage. The machine is a Dell T440 and it has a Perc Raid card with battery and 1GB of cache. All of these is installed at a company and working fine.

All the mirrors and Raid5 configs are held on the Perc so, from the O.O.S.S. view it has 3 disks: 240GB, 2TB and 6TB

First it was runing on Windows native and then we decided to upgrade the machine with the second processor, more RAM and the better Perc Card for this machine. And doing the upgrade we felt that will be better for the future to virtualize the Windows 2012 server that was running native on the machine.

So we installed Proxmox and a VM with the Windows 2012 Server plus a storage space for the Windows 2012 Server information (databases, documentation, etc.)

Everything right till now that they want to setup a couple of Windows Server VMs more. We're thinking about also upgrade all the S.S.O.O. to Windows 2022 Server.

I wonder if someone could advice me with the better config for this scenario, three Windows 2022 VMs and one storage unit that must be accesed from all three Windows VMs. I know that I can make one VM to access the storage unit and the other VMs will access through shares in the first VM (the way it's configured right now is LVM and I know that can't be shared). This setup will work but it'll be a bottleneck so I wonder if it could be done other way. I read that CephFS has the ability to be shared but I don't know anything about this and about realiability and perfomance and, what's more, if this can be done or has sense this way.

And, also, I'll upgrade to Proxmox 7 due to all these changes, upgrade or new install?

So, please, if someone could iluminate me will be great!

 

[Dunuin]

Don't know much about Ceph but you need atleast 3 Nodes for quorum so possibly not what you want.

And, also, I'll upgrade to Proxmox 7 due to all these changes, upgrade or new install?

Upgrading should be fine. New install might make sense if your old server was installed with PVE6.3 or lower and you want to use the new proxmox boot-tool introduced with PVE6.4.

 

[jparis]

Hi,

Decided to continue with this thread one year later and the question is the same:
2 VM with Windows Server 2022
1 Storage that must be shared between both VMs

Apart from mount the storage in one VM, share the unit, and mount this share in the remaining VM, is there anybody that could offer something different (and better)?

Thanks!

 

[bbgeek17]

It does not sound like your environment will benefit from complicating it with anything beyond regular CIFS share. Whether that share is served by one of your VMs or you purchase a NAS depends on your budget.
Serving it from existing VM is free. Buying some sort of NAS is not.
You also have to consider availability. A node failure with the VM which is serving a share can today be tolerated by PVE HA - free. Preventing an external storage failure requires investing in HA storage.
Additionally dont forget how your backup strategy will be affected.

P.S. it appears that perhaps you dont have PVE cluster now

---

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[LnxBil]

Apart from mount the storage in one VM, share the unit, and mount this share in the remaining VM, is there anybody that could offer something different (and better)?

As far as I understand it, this is a Windows question and cannot be solved by virtualization. Any kind of shared storage requires:
- a cluster-aware filesystem. If you want to use something like this, you can mount the disk as a disk for all VMs and create a cluster-aware filesystem (all Windows questions)
- use a file share like CIFS/NFS (also using virtFS using the same principles)
There is no other possibility. Maybe ask in a Windows-centric forum?