Where does Proxmox hide the VM's disks?

[jda13]

New to Proxmox but not to virtualization. After much ado about bios i was able to install Proxmox 8.2.2 onto my miniPC.

I'm trying to get a virtual appliance working on Proxmox. They have a KVM download and a VMware one. Their FAQ and help says to use the KVM version for Proxmox (two disk files). Their steps are create a VM in Proxmox with CPU/RAM you want and just a small HD as will be replacing that with the ones in the download. The next step I can do which is to detach the HD and remove it from the newly created VM. The next step is to copy the KVM HD files to the Proxmox server in the VM location.

This is the step I can't figure out. Where do I need to put the disk file? The appliance instuctions seem to be talking about an older version of Proxmox then the 8.2.2 as the path they say to look at is empty on the newly created Proxmox server. Don't seem to have their suggested path in front of me right now but was off /mnt.

I'm use to VMware and the VM's files all being in one location and faily easy to locate. I don't yet understand how Proxmox does storeage and VMs. The iso installer created a local-lvm which seems to be where I think VM's will be stored. but where excactly is that on the server? I foudn one post saying look in /var/lib/ but if my VM was there I couldn't tell. So where is this local/lvm or where should I place the disk file so I can attch to the VM?

 

[waltar]

With lvm you could see your vm/lxc by "lsblk" or "lvs" in your lvm pool. You cannot go there by cd as it isn't default in a filesystem if you don't define that as storage directory.
Btw. it's like the same if using zfs shown by "zfs list" where the vm/lxc lay as zvol of the pool.

 

[Pifouney]

hey,
check here : https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE#Supported_Import_Sources

 

[dakralex]

I'm use to VMware and the VM's files all being in one location and faily easy to locate. I don't yet understand how Proxmox does storeage and VMs. The iso installer created a local-lvm which seems to be where I think VM's will be stored. but where excactly is that on the server? I foudn one post saying look in /var/lib/ but if my VM was there I couldn't tell. So where is this local/lvm or where should I place the disk file so I can attch to the VM?

As the others already mentioned, there are different kinds of storages available for Proxmox VE hosts. By default, the installer is setup on a single disk, which is setup with a Logical Volume manager (pve-data/local-lvm) and a directory storage on top of that (pve-root/local). The difference between those two, is that the second is your typical filesystem with directories and files, and the first stores volumes - so they cannot be found by browsing in folders in your filesystem as they are not mounted there.

As for your problem, one solution to your problem would be to create a VM without a disk image (when creating the VM through the WebGUI just remove the disk by clicking on the trash icon). After you have finished, you can import an image with the command:

qm disk import <vmid> <source> <storage>

where <vmid> is the id of the new VM (e.g. 100), <source> is the path to the image (e.g. /mnt/foo/baseimage.img) and <storage> is the target storage where you want to store the new VM disk image (e.g. local-lvm).

 

[jda13]

Thanks all for the information, I hope to have time this weekend to try again to get the virtual appliance installed.