Best way to dedicate an NVMe SSD to a single VM in Proxmox?

[harold.thomas]

Hello everyone,

I’m setting up my second Proxmox server and I’d like some advice.

I want to assign a 4TB NVMe M.2 SSD to just one virtual machine, which I use as my backup NAS. The plan is to encrypt the whole disk (either with cryptsetup or Veracrypt) inside that VM.

I looked at PCI passthrough, but it seems rather complex and I couldn’t find a clear guide for my Intel N100 system. Has anyone tried this setup? Is there maybe an easier alternative?

Thanks a lot for your help!

 

[pcarone]

If you want to avoid the complexity of PCI passthrough, there’s a simpler method that works very well.

You can set up the NVMe drive as an LVM-Thin storage directly in Proxmox and then assign a virtual disk to your VM that uses this storage. From inside the VM, you can handle the encryption however you prefer.

1. In the web interface, go to Disks and check that the NVMe drive is empty. If it already has partitions, use the Wipe Disk option to clear it. Proxmox requires a clean disk to proceed.
2. Go to LVM-Thin, click Create: Thinpool, and choose your NVMe drive. Give the storage a clear name (e.g. nvme4tb, thinpool, etc.).
3. In your backup NAS VM, add a new virtual disk from this storage. Assign slightly less than the full 4TB (leave ~50GB free for metadata, snapshots, etc.).
4. Inside the VM, format the new disk, apply encryption, and use it as normal.

This way you keep things simple, get full Proxmox backup support, and it’s easier to migrate the VM to another host later if needed.

Hope this helps!