Moving VMDK to Local Storage (solved)

[bigun89]

I'm not real familiar with how LVM's work, so I need a little guidance.

I have some raw virtual disks I'm trying to get to local storage available to my proxmox installation (/dev/sdb1 setup as an lvm labeled "vmstorage").

I'm quite familiar with linux and mounting filesystems, but I don't see where sdb1 is mounted. I can only assume that file level access is accomplished with a third party utility or is available some other way.

The other issue is that the virtual disks are quite large, and reside on an external 16TB disk formatted with NTFS, I'm not even sure proxmox can mount it, so I believe I'll need to move the virtual disks over via SCP from my physical Windows machine.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[aaron]

Proxmox VE is making heavy use of the underlying storage technology. Therefore, depending on what you choose, you will have to use the native tools for that to interact with it.

For LVM it is the whole set of tools around that. To list logical volumes lvs, to list volume groups vgs and so on.

What are you trying to do? Get a VMDK file of 16TiB moved over to the vmstorage and inside a VM?

Did you already create a VM in Proxmox VE?

If so, you can use the command qm importdisk (man page). It will automatically create the disk image in the target storage and do needed conversion of the format on the fly. Once finished, you will have an "unused" disk in the VM config which you then can edit/attach.
If the VM needs to boot from the disk, don't forget to adapt the boot order in the VMs Options panel.

Mounting an NTFS disk should work. You'll have to do it on the CLI though. If the import might take some time, consider starting the qm importdisk command inside a screen or tmux session so you can disconnect from it while it keeps working.

 

[bigun89]

I figured it out.

I used the GUI to setup secondary storage *directly* on /dev/sdb without partitioning. I setup /dev/sdb1, formatted it ext4, and set it to automount in /etc/fstab using UUID and I think I'm off to the races.

This also may be due partly to my lack of knowledge on LVM as it's handled differently from what I understand.