[SOLVED] Direct Connected SAS drive throwing ext4-fs errors

[jcassel]

Hi Everyone,

I am new to Proxmox and have a Dell server that is directly connected to a Dell storage array through two SAS cables. In Proxmox I have mounted a storage volume directly and formatted the volume as EXT4. Here are the commands that I used:
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda
mount -t ext4 /dev/sda /mnt
In Proxmox Add Directory /mnt - make sure to select shared storage

This all seemed to be working great until I added a second Proxmox server to the cluster and connected the same storage to it as well. In the Proxmox cluster I do have it configured as shared storage:



My problem is that I am experiencing slowness and random issues on my VMs and I am also having issues importing new VMs over from VMWare.

When I pull up a console view of Proxmox I see this on the one Proxmox server:

And this on the other Proxmox server:

I would greatly appriciate any insight on what I should do to fix all these errors. Please also let me know if I can provide any additional relevant info.

Thanks,
J

 

[bbgeek17]

Hi @jcassel , welcome to the forum.

Based on your message, it seems to me that you would like to share your storage within the cluster. You did tick the "shared" option in your screenshot.
However, marking storage as shared does not actually make it shared. It's a message to PVE that it should expect to see this storage on all nodes and use it from all nodes.

The problem is that EXT4 is NOT concurrent access safe. You are actually guaranteed to have data corruption in such case.

If you wanted to use a file based shared storage you need a Cluster Filesystem. One option is OCFS2. There several good threads on this topic on the forum.

Another option is block storage addressing. For this you will use LVM and no Filesystem.

You should wipe your disk and reconfigure it properly going forward.
Good luck

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

 

[jcassel]

Thanks, that gives me the info I need.

 

[jcassel]

Just as a follow up on this case. I decided to use LVM for my VM storage. I was able to recover most of the servers from the corrupted ext4 storage using the backup feature. Moving forward since I no longer have snapshot capability I will use spot backups if I need a restore point.

It would be nice to have some sort of snapshot feature for block storage in the future.

 

[bbgeek17]

It would be nice to have some sort of snapshot feature for block storage in the future.

Hi @jcassel , glad you got things working for yourself.

Thick LVM is just one type of Block storage supported for Proxmox. There are others that provide both Shared functionality and Snapshots out of the box.

There is also some effort in development to enhance thick LVM.

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