VERY New to Proxmox! Trouble with Storage Setup Issues

[Kakarr0t]

Hi, I'm having trouble determining the best method of approach for my situation. I would be grateful for someone to help point me in the right direction.

I have A proxmox server configured, with two physical hard drives.
- The primary hard drive is partitioned out and hosts two vm's: an Ubuntu VM and a win 11 VM.
- The secondary hard drive is a 1TB drive not currently formatted yet.
. My goal is to create three partitions.
a) I want one partition to be the backup partition for snapshots from both VM's,
b) I would like to create a second partition to be mounted on the Ubuntu VM, and
c) a third partition to be mounted on the win 11 VM.

I'm having a difficult time determining how to do this with the tools provided in the Proxmox user interface. It seems like this should be very simple. Thank you in advance for your help. --Tim

 

[leesteken]

Using real drive partitions for VMs is unusual for (enterprise) virtualization. It can be done with Linux command line tools and disk passthrough but not via the web GUI. Usually you would turn a whole drive in a type of storage for Proxmox and just use virtual disks.

 

[Kakarr0t]

Using real drive partitions for VMs is unusual for (enterprise) virtualization. It can be done with Linux command line tools and disk passthrough but not via the web GUI. Usually you would turn a whole drive in a type of storage for Proxmox and just use virtual disks.

Thank you LeeSteken. If I were to do it via more conventional methods for an enterprise virtualization, how would I split up 1 physical disk into 3 separate shares, using one to back up VM's, and sharing a partition out to two different OS's (one linux and one windows OS)?

 

[leesteken]

If I were to do it via more conventional methods for an enterprise virtualization, how would I split up 1 physical disk into 3 separate shares, using one to back up VM's, and sharing a partition out to two different OS's (one linux and one windows OS)?

You simply would not do that. I looks like you are just repeating the same question. There are lots of guides on the internet for partitioning drives on Linux, use one of them.

What you ought to do is: backup your VMs to another system (and a copy off-site), for example using Proxmox Backup Server. And you would not dedicate a (non-redundant) partition to a VM. Just use the drive as storage (LVM-thin or ZFS or whatever you think is best) and put the virtual disk for the Linux VM and the virtual disk for the Windows VM on the storage.

And you would use enterprise SSDs and a mirror to ensure continuous operations when a drive fails. All of this has been discussed many times over in other threads in the past.

 

[Kakarr0t]

I'm building a siloed system in the even there's a ransomware/cyber attack at a hospital. Should that kind of event happen, I would disconnect the system from the hospital network, assume the currently running VM OS's are compromised, restore the OS's from a local backup and then use the now isolated and restored system in a limited emergency-based clinical setting. So that's the reason for a local backup drive.

The issue I'm running into with partitioning, is how to then share the partitions out to specific VM's. I kind of hit the ground running without having a formal education on how to use these tools and how they are logically designed and differ from one another.

 

[Kakarr0t]

What's confusing is that my primary node has access to a 1TB drive. I've now used ZFS to create a 1) backup directory, a 2) directory labeled 'windows-disk', and a 3) zfs directory labeled 'linux-disk'. the node has access to all vm's and all disks. How do I passthrough the zfs windows directory to the windows VM and the linux directory to the linux VM? It appears that a lot of people are using SMB and other NAS tools to do this, however why do we need to us a NAS solution when the primary node literally has everything attached to it (storage and VM's)? Shouldn't it just be able to provide a direct passthrough for each respective storage space? NAS seems like it's just adding another unnecessary element of complication to the mix.