Help with disks

[ellinj]

I am a new Proxmox user coming from VMware, I am trying to understand what I am seeing in the disk section. I have one drive in the system which is a 500gb SSD under LVM I have a disk labeled pve with a size of 499gb, seems right. Not sure what the 16LVs column means? Under LVM Thin, I have something called data data with a size of 382gb and is currently about 52% used.

What is the difference between an LVM and LVM-Thin?
Where did the 382gb come from? Where is the rest of the 500gb?
What does the number LVs mean? I assume this is something to do with the disk used by my vms. but not sure since it seems my capacity is being used on the LVM-Thin.

I am thinking the installer must of divied up the disk between LVM and LVM-Thin, but I am not sure.

Thanks for the help

 

[Kingneutron]

LVM-Thin is block storage, this is why you can't use it for anything but disk images and containers.

Number of LVs is Logical Volumes under LVM.

You can get a basic display of your LVM arrangement with:

pvs # physical volumes
vgs # volume groups
lvs # logical volumes

Full commands (all have man pages):

pvdisplay
vgdisplay
lvdisplay

If you want further than that, I know of 3 good alternatives that will give you a better LVM view:

webmin # runs on port 10000
SuSE YAST # text mode and GUI

WeLees graphical LVM utility https://www.welees.com/lvm-support.html

You may also see some useful information with gparted, but I have not tested this.

 

[Kingneutron]

Grab the pve iso and do a test install to a VM. The very first popup after Agreeing in the installer has an Advanced Options where you can limit the disk size, swap size, rootfs and thin-lvm.

Very useful, since you want ~30-40GB for rootfs +1-2GB for swap, and your VMs will be going on lvm-thin unless you're using ZFS.

By limiting the disk size for pve to less than the entire physical disk size, you can also leave room at the end to create a single-disk ZFS partition post-install. Or XFS, or whatever you want to use it for.