USB3 external raid-1 storage?

[bthoven]

I installed Proxmox on internal SSD inside my Dell 3020 Micro PC and I also install and run OpenMediaVault VM guest on the same internal SSD. As my host server is Dell 3020 Micro with USB3 port, I intend to attach a usb3 enclosure which supports Raid-1 on two 3.5" SATA drives. The external drives are intended for data storage only. All VM guests and lxc containers are still on the internal SSD. This small server is for personal use only, so not much workload on it.

Any thought on how to set up Proxmox to handle such external storage? or any recommendations are welcome.

Thank you.

ps. FYI, I also run Nextcloud lxc container, Debian headless (with docker installed and have Pihole and qbittorent docker containers). These VM/containers should store their permanent data on the external drives (Raid-1) too.

 

[Dunuin]

Isn't that easy. You shouldn't use ZFS because of the raid1 so storage would be LVM or LVM-thin. But OMV in a VM isn't optimal because you can't bind-mount folders from the host into a VM. So if multiple VMs should use the same USB-Disk you need to setup a SMB/NFS server sharing the folders on the USB-HDD so VMs can access them using SMB/NFS shares. On the other hand unprivileged LXCs can't mount NFS/SMB shares (and privileged LXC shouldn't be used because of security) so its not that easy to bring the network shares into the LXCs.
You could bring the USB-HDDs into your OMV VM by using USB-Passthrough but that is neighter very reliable nor fast. You could try to PCI passthrough a complete USB controller into your OMV VM so you don't need USB passthrough anymore, but that also might be hard if you don't buy a dedicated PCIe USB controller card. And I guess if you machine hasn't any space to add SATA drives or a SATA controller card you also don't got the slots or space to add a USB controller.

And then there is "qm set" pseudo passthrough. You could use that to bring your HDD it into your OVM VM so you OMV can share it over SMB/NFS.

So all not optimal.

 

[bthoven]

Thank you for the detailed explanation.

 

[Dunuin]

There is a workaround to bring SMB/NFS shares into unprivileged LXCs but it is very annoying...
Because you can't mount SMB/NFS shares inside a unprivileged LXC you would need to mount the shares directly on your host. Then you can bind-mount the mountpoint of these share into the LXC. But because of the user-remapping of unprivileged LXCs your users (even the root user) won't be able to access the bind-mounted folders because of missing rights to that folder. For that you would need to manually edit the user-remapping.