Home Media / Test Lab Server with Shared Storage

[Dr.Cooper]

I am looking at setting up a ProxMox server to mainly use as a media server, but also have the flexibility to run multiple operating systems in Virtual machines.

First off if there is a tutorial or something I should read that tells me whatever I need to know, feel free to point me in that direction. If this has already been covered somewhere, feel free to point me in that direction.

I have;
10th generation 16 core intel processor with 32 GB of RAM
1TB Western Digital Black nvme as my boot drive and Virtual machine drive (I am open to moving the virtual machines to another nvme)

For storage I have the following locally SATA attached hard drives. The content on these drives do not change very often and are read more than written. They do get updated with daily podcast updates. None of these drives are setup as raid drives.
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12TB Personal files (Data, Photo's, etc...)
14TB Media Drive
16TB Media Drive
18TB Media Drive
18TB Media Drive
20TB Media Drive

My Currently planned Virtiual Machines
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Linux
- Jellyfin
- Jriver Media Center
- Possibly NextCloud for GroupWare functionality

Other Linux operating systems (For lab and specialty apps)

Windows 10 (For lab and specialty apps)

Windows 11 (For lab and specialty apps)

My questions:
- Is it possible to setup the storage drives so that multiple Virtual Machines can access and or write to all or some of the storage drives?
- What would be the preferred hard drive format/file system?

I did search the forum to see if this has been asked already. I either worded my question incorrectly or did not understand the posts to identify a potential solution.

I did find the following post that seemed like it suggested setting up a virtual machine running open media vault as the shared storage, which sounded interesting. Just not sure that is the best method, as it is almost 10years old.

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/best-solution-for-shared-storage.16788/

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• Dec 15, 2015

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• #4

If i had multiple VM's sharing the same files from drive 2
1) create a KVM on Drive one.
2) install openmediavault (or any other NAS) on it.
3) pass drive 2 to said VM
4) share that drive (or its pools) via NFS protocol to all VM's running on it.
Proxmox-wiki and the NAS-wiki(s) will help​

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I have installed ProxMox before and got lost in this section and switched back to a standalone Linux install. I am now looking to try again.

I have done localized virtual machines in VMware and VirtualBox, so I have some knowledge. The hypervisor world is still a new thing.

Looking to see if anyone has an idea how to best approach this. Thank you in advance for any ideas or help.

 

[Dr.Cooper]

I want to say how impressed I am with ProxMox support, and the overly friendly user community.

I expected a ton of posts about how stupid my question was. Or that this has been asked and answered multiple times. Maybe that I should spend more time searching the forums.

But nothing!!!

23 days and not a single response. Not a single recommendation! Not a single solution!

I am impressed!!!!

 

[Dunuin]

- Is it possible to setup the storage drives so that multiple Virtual Machines can access and or write to all or some of the storage drives?

Usually you would set up some SMB/NFS server handling those disks and then mount the SMB/NFS shares inside the VMs. This could be a NAS VM with disk passthrough, a NAS LXC with bind-mouned folders from the disks that are mounted on the PVE host or directly running the SMB/NFS server on the PVE host. PVE itself doesn't come with any NAS features but you can do anything with it you could do with every Debian server...including setting it up as a NAS via CLI.

- What would be the preferred hard drive format/file system?

Depends. I wouldn't go for ZFS or traditional SW/HW raid with those mixed capacity drives. Maybe an UnRaid VM which should be able to raid those mixed sized disks? You should also think about a good backup strategy in case you care about your media. Especially without a raid for redundancy as all disks will fail sooner or later.

 

[Dr.Cooper]

Thank you Sir.

I appreciate the guidance. I have a fair amount of IT /Technology knowledge but really wanted to to make the most out of my Hardware via ProxMox. I also wanted to learn more about ProxMox by putting it into use. Planning tends to save time and trial and error.

Since my storage drives do not change much, I have multiple redundant drives that maintain copies of the drives.

Once again Thank you!!!!