mount/install a drive from a different VE host.

[wmswartz]

Hi, new to ProxMox and Linux. I've re-installed a number of times(because I screwed up, or couldn't figure something out). Fortunately the install is quick and not a massive amount of VM's yet.

My drive configuration is : an SSD boot, 6 drive NVME ZFS Raidz, and 1 external 224g SSD for ISO & Backups.

Since I've done this a couple of times. So far I've had to completely wipe and re-install because of errors at the command line. One thing I can't seem to figure out is how to mount an existing external drive with proxmox configuration/data in it..

The external drive is /dev/sdc/ and it is configured in the gui as a Directory where I store ISO's and backup files.

dir: extUSB
path /mnt/pve/extUSB
content images,vztmpl,rootdir,snippets,backup,iso
is_mountpoint 1
nodes pmox


When I rebuild, it would be great to take that existing drive all ready partitioned and to add it to the Proxmox storage as the exact same format. I'm pretty sure there is a way, but I can't figure out the sequence. Editing the storage.cfg by itself is not enough.

Another use case would be where I have a different proxmox server with an external backup directory, and I want to move that drive to a new/different host and restore the files from there.

That would be a great new product offering from the UI. IE, you add the external drive and ProxMox recognizes it as a pve drive and asks if you want to mount it . Currently when I do add directory, it tells me there is no disk unused. I've figured out how to mount and move the backup files at the linux level, but I would like to not have to move them, just consume them inside of Proxmox.

Thanks!

 

[wmswartz]

Any help with this? Seems like a simple concept. Take drive a from pve server a and move it to pve server b. (with all the associated configuration components so that you can consume the data)

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

You need to mount '/dev/sdc' (sdc1 if you've created partitions on the disk) at '/mnt/pve/extUSB' - by adding it in '/etc/fstab'.
Then you should see the content of the storage.

if you want to reuse the guest-images - you would additionally need to have a backup of the configs (for guests files in '/etc/pve' - '/etc/pve/qemu-server' (KVM guests), '/etc/pve/lxc' (Containers)) - and place them on '/etc/pve/qemu-server' or '/etc/pve/lxc' on the new system)


I hope this helps!

 

[wmswartz]

You need to mount '/dev/sdc' (sdc1 if you've created partitions on the disk) at '/mnt/pve/extUSB' - by adding it in '/etc/fstab'.
Then you should see the content of the storage.

if you want to reuse the guest-images - you would additionally need to have a backup of the configs (for guests files in '/etc/pve' - '/etc/pve/qemu-server' (KVM guests), '/etc/pve/lxc' (Containers)) - and place them on '/etc/pve/qemu-server' or '/etc/pve/lxc' on the new system)


I hope this helps!

Thank you Stoiko, really appreciate it. (I was pretty sure it was relatively straight forward)