misunderstanding drive types and usage

[rklz]

I have a newly installed proxmox 8.2.4 installation. Proxmox is installed on a 4TB NVME drive in a supermicro chassis. I have added 2 additional SATA 8TB SSD's. I already have some simple VM's running off the NVME drive, but nothing on the two additional ones yet. I added the two additional drives as LVM and named the first SATA drive local2 and the second SATA drive backup. My intention is to run 2 new extremely large VM's (home media server and nextcloud server) on the 2nd SATA drive and back everything up to the backup drive periodically.

My problem is that I can't get backup functionality to show for the backup drive. I want to be able to put complete, self contained, compressed VM backups on the backup drive. What am I missing?

As a side note, I think I even fundamentally misunderstand the primary drive that is named PVE. I show a volume named pve that is on /dev/nvme0n1p3, but it shows as 100% used even though the VM's on it are extremely small. It shows 4TB size and 17.44GB free. But when I go into terminal and do a df -h, I don't see any of my large volumes. Running mount doesn't show them mounted anywhere, so I'm not even sure how the system is using them.

 

[dakralex]

I want to make the default storage layout of Proxmox VE a little bit more clear to you. It depends how you configured your hard drive setup during the installation, but by default Proxmox VE would create the following on your NVMe drive:

- a ~1 MB BIOS boot partition,
- a 512 to 1024 MB EFI ESP partition, and
- use up the rest for the OS/data partition.

and will create a LVM with the following logical volumes on your OS/data partition (if you use ext4 [default] or XFS):

- a 512 to 8192 MB pve-swap volume for the swap file (can be changed with the "swapsize" option),
- a pve-root volume for the host's root (maximum size can be changed with the "maxroot" option, 96 GB by default), and
- a pve-data volume using up the rest of the partition (minimum size can be changed with the "minfree" option)

The local storage is then just another directory (by default /var/lib/vz), just like the local-lvm storage which uses the pve-data volume as a thinpool, which is the reason why the pve volume group is shown as full as there is not much/no space left for other logical volumes. You still have plenty of space in the LVM thinpool if you take a look into the "Datacenter > Disks > LVM-Thin" section in the WebGUI.

 

[dakralex]

As for the backups, I'm not sure if I fully understand what you mean with "backup functionality". Have you already added the two disks as storages for your PVE host? There are plenty of ways to backup VMs, for one you can setup a backup job in "Datacenter > Backup" and set the schedule, destination, etc. to your backup drive. For fast incremental backups there's also Proxmox Backup Server [1].

[1] https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-backup-server/overview

 

[rklz]

As for the backups, I'm not sure if I fully understand what you mean with "backup functionality". Have you already added the two disks as storages for your PVE host? There are plenty of ways to backup VMs, for one you can setup a backup job in "Datacenter > Backup" and set the schedule, destination, etc. to your backup drive. For fast incremental backups there's also Proxmox Backup Server [1].

[1] https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-backup-server/overview

Yes, I've already added them both as LVM storage. But the one named backup, I'd prefer to be able to use it for both full VM backups (EVERYTHING in a self contained backup in case my primary NVME fails), but also use it for non critical vm's as well if there is enough space left.