Proper way of utilizing additional drives?

[CrookedLanes]

Hi all,

Very new to Proxmox.

I have a Dell server with (2) 256GB NVMe drives and (2) 4TB drives.

I have managed to get through the basics of installing Proxmox, configuring the 256GB drives to ZFS (sounds like a better use than doing RAID 1) as well as installing some VM's.

When installing Proxmox, I did see all of the drives but I only selected the (2) 256GB drives assuming that was strictly where I wanted Proxmox installed. I assumed selecting the (2) 4TB drives would come later.

What I'm trying to figure out is how do I "attach" my (2) 4TB drives? Essentially I want to run a VM (let's say Windows which is setup already) and go into File Explorer and store files onto the 4TB drives. I'm not sure how to add them into Proxmox/configure ZFS/see them in other VM's.

Thank you.

P.S. For bonus points, how do I attach my external USB drive so I can restore a backup of files to my Windows OS after getting those 4TB drives mounted? Thanks again!

 

[Hqu]

Hey,

preferably you can utilize your drives with ZFS (can only attached when other bare-metal machine also have ZFS kernel modules installed) via WebGui: Node > Disks > ZFS > Create: ZFS - then you can select your disks and choose your configuration.
Be aware that you only can use that for Disk images & Containers

Or you can enter your CLI and use ext4 and mount it as a folder and add it directly to proxmox that way, if this is what floats your boat.

Best

 

[CrookedLanes]

Hey,

preferably you can utilize your drives with ZFS (can only attached when other bare-metal machine also have ZFS kernel modules installed) via WebGui: Node > Disks > ZFS > Create: ZFS - then you can select your disks and choose your configuration.
Be aware that you only can use that for Disk images & Containers

Or you can enter your CLI and use ext4 and mount it as a folder and add it directly to proxmox that way, if this is what floats your boat.

Best

So I ended up finding this, and making it just before reading your response. If this is only for disk images and containers, it's not what I want.

I wiped out the ZFS config and it sounds like I need to make a new directory/EXT4 - how can I combine the 4TB drives in some form of a RAID in case one fails and/or combine the storage?

And then, how do I mount the directory to Windows so I can save files to it?

 

[Hqu]

Use ZFS instead of mdadm raid- vm disk are zvolumes on datasets these can be mounted, there are some steps you need to do in order to find, which vm disk is your corresponding zvolume.

1. Check with ls -l /dev/zvol/$pool/data/ which vm disk points to the block device
2. With fdisk -l query your logical device for filesystem
3. Mount your zvol with mount /dev/$vmdisk /mnt/$mountfolder

As creating a mdadm raid is not recommended - https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99171 I would really recommend you to use ZFS regards of your operations.

Let me know if this works for you or have some troubles understanding it.

Best