howto format internal secondary ssd to be able to make snaphots

[manilx]

Hi

I have a Protecli FW6E device with one msata and one aditional ssd internally mounted. Former has proxmox installed and all the VM's (/dev/sda2).
I'd like to move the VM's to the other SSD, which I have formatted etx4 and added as directory in storage (/dev/sdb1). Can't make snapshots of VM's there.

How can I format this SSD and add it as a storage, so to be able to move VM's there and make snapshots?

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 32G 0 32G 0% /dev
tmpfs 6.3G 1.2M 6.3G 1% /run
/dev/mapper/pve-root 94G 4.4G 85G 5% /
tmpfs 32G 46M 32G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
/dev/sdb1 916G 576K 870G 1% /mnt/pve/ssd
/dev/sda2 511M 328K 511M 1% /boot/efi
/dev/fuse 128M 24K 128M 1% /etc/pve
192.168.2.50:/proxmox 1.0T 326G 699G 32% /mnt/pve/qnap
tmpfs 6.3G 0 6.3G 0% /run/user/0


Help appreciated.

 

[Dunuin]

First you choose a storage that supports snapshots. See the table here: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage#_storage_types

In case of LVM-Thin and ZFS you can create those storages through the webUI if you wipe your SSD first.
Datacenter -> YourNode -> Disks -> YourSSD -> "Wipe" button
Datacenter -> YourNode -> Disks -> LVM-Thin or ZFS -> "Create: Thinpool" or "Create: ZFS" button

 

[manilx]

Awesome! Done, thank you!

Another question: to move the VM's to the new disk what is the best/correct way:
1. backup, delete original and restore to new disk
or 2. move the VM disk to the new storage via disk action-move storage?

Ideally what I'm targetting at is that when the msata dies (have read that proxmox taxes internal ssd's) I have all the VM's configured and ready to run on the ssd once I change the msata and reinstall proxmox......

 

[Dunuin]

Awesome! Done, thank you!

Another question: to move the VM's to the new disk what is the best/correct way:
1. backup, delete original and restore to new disk
or 2. move the VM disk to the new storage via disk action-move storage?

Option 2, just moving the virtual disks to the new storage.

Ideally what I'm targetting at is that when the msata dies (have read that proxmox taxes internal ssd's) I have all the VM's configured and ready to run on the ssd once I change the msata and reinstall proxmox......

Then you also need to regularily backup your "/etc/pve" folder as the VM/LXC config files are still needed to run the guests and these are stored in "/etc/pve/lxc" and "/etc/pve/qemu-server". Without them you only got some virtual disks but no VMs that are runable.

 

[manilx]

Thanks for the info!

Then you also need to regularily backup your "/etc/pve" folder as the VM/LXC config files are still needed to run the guests and these are stored in "/etc/pve/lxc" and "/etc/pve/qemu-server". Without them you only got some virtual disks but no VMs that are runable.

So if I backup those 2 folders to my Mac and then in the future copy them back I'll have the VM's ready to run. Do I need a reboot of the proxmox server before they are recognized or will they appear once the folders are populated?

(I obviously am using the backup feature of proxmox to external disks but you'll never know, 2 backups are better than 1).