Passing partial disk to VM running Windows Server 2019

[xlogic11]

I need to expand my Microsoft Exchange 2019 database running under Server 2019. I have installed 2 enterprise SSD's (480gb) and would like to partition 100gb from each SSD in a RAID 1 setup. Being new to Proxmox i thought of the following idea. The two SSD's are sde and sdf.

1. Partition each SSD to crave out 100gb.
2. Assign each of these 2 partitions to the VM. In this case Server 2019.
3. In Server 2019 create a mirror drive from each of the 100gb partitions. This should give me a Windows drive letter where I can move the database to.

I'm just not sure how to configure Proxmox to achieve this task. Any help or guidance would be very helpful.

Thanks
/Ron

 

[Stefan_R]

To answer your question directly: You can pass through any block device to a VM using qm set <vmid> -scsiX /dev/disk/by-id/foobar-partY where X is the first unused scsi controller in your VM config (or replace it with 'sataX' or similar) and Y is the partition number to pass through.

HOWEVER. I wouldn't recommend this setup at all.

First of all, generally it is good practice to handle redundancy transparently to the guest VM. That is, put a RAID10 (or ZFS mirror) on the drives directly on PVE, no partitioning, add it as a storage, and then generate a normal VM disk on that with a size of 100 GiB and assign that to your VM. Windows can then just use it as a regular, single hard drive.

Secondly, even if you want to do the mirroring in your guest for some reason, don't assign a partition directly - just put a regular storage pool (LVM, ZFS, ext4 with qcow2, whatever) on both of your drives, seperately, then add two drives with 100 GiB size to your VM via the regular GUI and assign each one to a different pool. This will have the same effect as doing partitions, but supports the full PVE functionality (snapshots, backups, etc...), which isn't possible with directly assigned partitions.