Storing VMs on NVME via M.2 NVME to PCIe 3.0 Adaptor

[KBlast]

Hello, I am new to proxmox and VMs.

I have 2x 480gb NVme2 (Corsair Force MP510) and 1x 1TB NVME (970 evo plus) and 3x NMVE2 to PCIe 3.0 Adaptors. There is no NVMe2 connection on my motherboard

For VMs that I want to run concurrently, can I run multiple VMs per NVME? If so, that is accomplished via partitioning and/or through proxmox? If I can run multiple VMs from the same NVME, I may try to get NVME to PCIe 3.0 adaptors that can hold 2 or even 3 of the NVME2 at once. On PCIe 3.0 what would be the upper limit of VMs that could be running through 1 slot and accessing the NVMe2s?

Or am I limited to passing through one PCIE slot per VM and each NVME can only be accessed by whichever VM it's passed through to?

Thanks!

 

[aaron]

If you add new disks to a PVE node you can set them up to be used as storage. You can do that via the GUI in the <node>->Disks panel.

There are different types of storage [0] and you can select which you want. I recommend setting them up in a (mirror) RAID so that if one disk fails the VMs using them as storage are not lost.

How the VM disks are stored depends on the type of storage.

Keep in mind that consumer/prosumer SSDs tend to wear out more quickly than datacenter grade SSDs. Overall you will get better performance using NVMEs or regular SATA SSDs compared to spinning HDDs as the latency for I/O operations is much lower. If you run multiple VMs on the same storage, IOPS (IO operations Per Second) tends to be the limiting factor.

How many VMs you can run on your setup depends heavily on what your expectations are and what you are running on it.


[0] https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapter_storage

 

[KBlast]

Thanks for the feedback, Aaron. One more question. I am not sure if I can do what I want to do below.

My plan right now is to use Hyper M.2 x16 Card V2, which can support 4x NMVE2.

I am thinking of running the 2x 480gb NVME in a mirror raid and store my VMs here. Then I want to use the 1TB NVME as a scratch disk for some of the video editing I'll be doing.

Would this be possible or would setting raid involve all the NMVE drives on the Hyper card?

 

[aaron]

I don't know that card and if it is a simple one that just splits up 16x PCI lanes to 4x 4 lanes of if it has some active components that try to be smart