External USB HDD for multiple VMs

[TheHellSite]

Hello,

I would like to run an OpenWrt and Debian VM on my proxmox node.
OpenWrt will serve as the gateway for my homenetwork, SMB server, DLNA server, OpenVPN server + client, Wireguard server ...
Debian will be my downloading machine and all of its traffic will be going directly trough the OpenVPN tunnel of my OpenWrt VM.

I have an external HDD I would like to use as storage for the SMB and DLNA server.
Additionally I would like this HDD to be available in my Debian downloading vm, so I can save all downloads directly on it.

What is the best way to achieve this?
Option 1: external USB HDD connected to OpenWrt VM <--> SMB server <------------------> Debian VM
Option 2: OpenWrt VM <--> HDD connected to Proxmox node and configured in both VMs as storage device <--> Debian VM

I think option 2 is the better of both, am I right?
If yes, how could I achieve this?

 

[fireon]

Option2 with LVM-Thin.

 

[TheHellSite]

The drive is already formated as an NTFS volume with lots of files on it.
Is it possible to mount this volume to two VMs at the same time, so both VMs can read/write data to it synchronous?

 

[fireon]

No. You must remove everything from the disk, also partitiontables. After that you can add the disc with the PVE Webinterface as LVM-Thin.

 

[TheHellSite]

Sadly that is not an option for me as I would like to also use it with any Windows PC, thus the need for NTFS.

I guess my only option then is to always attach it to my OpenWrt VM and grant r/w access to it for my Download-VM via the SMB share, right?

 

[fireon]

hmm, yes sadly. You can also share the disk directly from proxmox with NFS oder Samba. Direct have more performance. Maybe it helps you in your situation.

 

[TheHellSite]

Sadly the DLNA client is only able to access drives mounted in OpenWrt, so I will need to stick to its Samba share.

But thanks for the input!!
I hope something like this (Shared USB drives for multiple VMs / virtual-mounpoint for USB drives that you can add to multiple VMs) will be available in future releases of proxmox.