Proxmox VE with multiple hard drives

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kokoticek

Active Member
Jun 7, 2010
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EDIT:
Just saw UEFI works, but secure boot doesn't. Guess it's not part of Proxmox philosophy to be charged by Microsoft to have a shim file signed, which is also good thing, not complaining.

If 2 hard drives, does Proxmox installer give the option to configure one single whole LVM for all its partitions? I.e., so Proxmox VE sees the 2 drives as one.

Thanks.
 
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the installer only supports single-disk LVM setups. if you want RAID, use a HW-RAID controller or ZFS.
 
I thought one could setup single LVM volume over multiple disks without RAID 0...
a) Or is this actually possible, just not in the installer?

b) If I'm wrong in a), how can I configure a proper Proxmox storage in the other unselected disk? I think I'd like another lvm-thin storage for the VMs...

c) In Proxmox installer, I certainly saw the ZFS option, but 2 things: still listed the 2 hard disks individually as in still choosing just one, and does ZFS already work well now with UEFI?
 
kokoticek said:
I thought one could setup single LVM volume over multiple disks without RAID 0...
a) Or is this actually possible, just not in the installer?
Click to expand...

there are all sorts of mirror, stripe, software-RAID setups based on LVM that are possible, but none of them are supported in the installer (and most of them are not a good idea unless you really know what you are doing).

b) If I'm wrong in a), how can I configure a proper Proxmox storage in the other unselected disk? I think I'd like another lvm-thin storage for the VMs...
Click to expand...

depends on the storage type. check the admin guide: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapter_lvm

c) In Proxmox installer, I certainly saw the ZFS option, but 2 things: still listed the 2 hard disks individually as in still choosing just one, and does ZFS already work well now with UEFI?
Click to expand...

the installer supports all the basic pool setups:
  • single-disk ("RAID 0")
  • striped ("RAID 0")
  • mirrored ("RAID 1")
  • stripe of mirrors ("RAID 10")
  • raid-z
all but the first one require multiple disks ;)

ZFS+UEFI is not yet supported without manual workarounds in PVE 5.x[/quote]
 
Talking about storages, I just saw the VMs' virtual disks themselves are "special block" files inside /dev, not plain ordinary files. Even highlighted in yellow in the command line. Though certainly all the VMs here are "raw" files; don't know if it's related...

IIRC in VirtualBox and libvirt one can migrate a VM entirely by just copying all of its virtual disk(s) and configuration files all along. Guess this is not the case for Proxmox?
 
it depends on the storage whether disks/volumes are files, block devices, or data exposed as block devices (this is also the case for libvirt and VirtualBox by the way, but I think their defaults use files..)
 
fabian said:
it depends on the storage whether disks/volumes are files, block devices, or data exposed as block devices (this is also the case for libvirt and VirtualBox by the way, but I think their defaults use files..)
Click to expand...
And what's Proxmox's case?

Also, in another apart thing, back to OP again, after installing Proxmox with all defaults (ext4, etc) on the server with 2 hard disks, I found that it installed using both disks in a single LVM anyways! I suspect that, when Proxmox installer asked which disk to use, it was actually asking just where to put Proxmox system root partition; but the rest of sda and whole sdb were united in single LVM for VM storage!

Does it mean server actually included a hardware RAID? I really thought this was not the case...
 
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