New User - Help Needed and suggestion

[nio707]

Dear Community Greetings, hope you all are doing well.

I am new user of Proxmox VE and need the help needed in following.
My server is Dell Server with 16Gb Ram, 2Gb Hw Perch Raid HDD. I have allotted 100Gb to the Proxmox, and 1 Tb(at present) for NethServer7 (Running Samba4 AD and Fileserver). My Backup is configured to the NFS share of the Synollogy NAS 4TB. I have connected a 4TB usb HDD to the Server with the intention of using it as local storage for backup, since the backup on NAS is taking too much time and dual redundancy.

1. I have installed NethServer7 VM in PVE in local LVM, but the filesystem is Ext4. Someone suggests me for XFS instead of Ext4. Had taken the recent backup in NAS. Is there any alternate way to convert the FS without reinstalling. If not the procedure to do that.

2. I am unable to use the USB HDD. From console I can see the HDD using lsblk with SDA1 and SDA2 with SDA2. I mounted the SDA2 using command mount /dev/sda2 /var/lib/vz2 but in the Gui I am not able to add the Directory, which says no free disk.

 

[aaron]

Is there any alternate way to convert the FS without reinstalling. If not the procedure to do that.

Not really, but you can just stay happy with ext4

2. I am unable to use the USB HDD. From console I can see the HDD using lsblk with SDA1 and SDA2 with SDA2. I mounted the SDA2 using command mount /dev/sda2 /var/lib/vz2 but in the Gui I am not able to add the Directory, which says no free disk.

Is the disk already formatted? If so, you will have to make sure it is mounted (manually, /etc/fstab, systemd mount). Then you can create a directory storage at mounted path (Datacenter -> Storage -> Add -> Directory) to use it in PVE.

 

[nio707]

Not really, but you can just stay happy with ext4

Is the disk already formatted? If so, you will have to make sure it is mounted (manually, /etc/fstab, systemd mount). Then you can create a directory storage at mounted path (Datacenter -> Storage -> Add -> Directory) to use it in PVE.

Ya decided to stay with EXT4 at the moment. FileServer performance is not bad either. USB HDD couldn't be formatted with xfs, but formatting with ext4 happens easily. I forgot to manually add the HDD in /etc/ftab file, and added the directory storage to be used in PVE. Next day, I found that the directory is still available.
a) How ??
b) Is the data going to the Portable HDD or being cached by Proxmox ??
c) The portable HDD though USB 3.1 performance is also not good either than the NAS. Is this a good option or should I use NAS's second Ethernet directly connected with Xross Cable with the secondary ethernet of the Server in different IP pool and keep the NAS secondary backup in NAS using NAS internal Backup utility.

 

[aaron]

Next day, I found that the directory is still available.

Did you remove the external disk? If you do so, you need to unmount it first. Then you should also disable the storage config so PVE knows that the storage is not present.

If you are only adding the disk temporarily, I would not go down the /etc/fstab route but probably script something that will mount the disk at the right place and enable the storage and then also the other way around.

There is something created by the community that could help you as well: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/usb-automount.39296/