So I have been running a proxmox server for a few month now, just playing with it a bit blindly. Just recently bough another drive and reading the storage docs I got some question how does everyone else do things… now I’m planning a backup strategy and want to know what are good practices to manage my VMs/LXC and storage in general.

I currently have:

  • 250G SSD shared between host and VMs/LXC
  • 4TB HDD in RAID1 (ZFS)
  • 8TB HDD as LVM

I normally create VMs with 30G base storage in the SSD and add another virtual hard drive to the VM from the HDDs to create a LVM inside the VMs to store data. Is that good enough? Would I have bad performance creating the VMs in the HDDs?

When creating a snapshot I see this warning below:

WARNING: Sum of all thin volume sizes (438.00 GiB) exceeds the size of thin pool pve/data and the size of whole volume group (<223.07 GiB).

That got me wondering:

  • How should I store snapshots in another drive? In the ZFS? Would cause issues if I delete old snapshots?
  • What about backups for the VMs? I’d like to have automatic weekly backups but how should I plan this?
  • Also I’m not sure if the 8TB is ok as LVM or should be LVM-thin or directory?

If you know any proxmox storage management guide for newbies please share, any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading.

  • @curveEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    You’ve got a lot going on here.

    Snapshots: In general, you can take zfs snapshots and then use syncoid to send them to another system. LVM snapshots are atomic all the same but afaik those are just done via the “snapshot” portion of a VM. They really aren’t used for backups if I recall.

    Backups: Are you planning on backing up on this system or to another? Using Proxmox Backup Server is your best bet honestly. Super capable product.

    Performance: Unless you’re really pushing these VMs, the impact of running on the HDDs should be negligible.

    LVM vs thin- LVM thin just lets you overallocate is all. You can allocate 30GB but it’ll only use up to it as it goes. Allocating 30GB on LVM normal will hold that 30GB for itself regardless.