Very specific setup, needing very specific advisory

Twixers223

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Aug 21, 2026
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I've got a homelab here with two servers. One server takes only 2.5" drives, and the other takes 3.5" (+2.5" with an adapter) drives. Of course, the one with the 2.5" drives is my main server with all my vms on it, which makes it very cost efficient, but the second server with 3.5" drives is for a NAS. Unfortunately with this setup I believe I cannot use ceph (I tried, its a massive hassle with a lot of undersized page errors), as I cannot add drives from both servers, only one.

That leads me to my conundrum: I need to share two drives between the two servers. Both drives are in a single server.
The reason for this: one of the drives is used for ISO storage and backups, as its my largest 2.5" drive! I would like the vm on the 3.5" drive server to be backed up, as with my other vms. The second one would be used for the vm os for the nas, kept in the 2.5" as Id rather only a single 2.5" drive in the 3.5" server to prioritize storage.

I made a bit of a visual here to better describe what Im talking about. As it says, I dont want to use any other additional vms than what I already have for this, either.
Screenshot_20260821_041323.png
 
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I'm not sure why you are stipulating no additional VMs. I think it makes the most sense to me for PVE to consume the storage first since it has a decent list of local redundant storage options. Then everything is a VM on top of that.

That is an advantage of virtualization: consolidation and sharing of resources, including storage. Another advantage is hardware agnostic mobility. So you can purchase a new server and hot-migrate your VMs over, or selectively move virtual disks from one storage type or performance class to another.

I would suggest considering a third server of some sort that can be the server for backups. If you simply cannot do that, then some additional file server and PBS VMs on the two existing PVE hosts perhaps. You can move the VMs around as needed to maintain the desired level of redundancy and isolation.
 
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The usual methods are to use NFS (which performs poor for VM workloads) and is a file level storage, or iSCSI, with that you can share the block storage.
See https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_storage_types
The arch wiki has a nice introduction on how to configure a iSCSI target (aka "server"): https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ISCSI/LIO
Hey, thanks ! I got NFS working. Its performance isn't much of a concern for me, and it seemed to be the easiest and quickest option here in terms of setup for my situation

Thanks again for the help!