Proxmox advice wanted!

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Over on this thread loads of people made helpful suggestions that I look into Proxmox. So I did and after a painful install experience I have a fully up-to-date version running on an old Mac mini to see how it goes.

This is a whole new world to me and I think I’m having to learn some new concepts.

My Mac mini has two physical hard drives, a 1TB and a 4TB (yes, you can - literally - squeeze a 4TB drive in :slight_smile: ). Both drives had/have data on them. The 4TB was removed during the PVE installation. Obviously the 1TB is now the boot drive and all previous data destroyed. But when I look in the PVE GUI that disk appears to be 96% full. Which is not what I expected.

Here’s what I have.

NAME               MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda                  8:0    0 931.5G  0 disk 
├─sda1               8:1    0  1007K  0 part 
├─sda2               8:2    0   512M  0 part 
└─sda3               8:3    0   931G  0 part 
  ├─pve-swap       253:0    0     7G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
  ├─pve-root       253:1    0    96G  0 lvm  /
  ├─pve-data_tmeta 253:2    0   8.1G  0 lvm  
  │ └─pve-data     253:4    0 795.8G  0 lvm  
  └─pve-data_tdata 253:3    0 795.8G  0 lvm  
    └─pve-data     253:4    0 795.8G  0 lvm  
sdb                  8:16   0   3.7T  0 disk 
├─sdb1               8:17   0   200M  0 part 
└─sdb2               8:18   0   3.7T  0 part

If I want to leave that drive as the boot and store my data on another (the 4TB I need to get PVE to see and or show me that drive. So I think I need to add it using the shell. But - according to the interwebs - there appears to be more ways to add a HD to PVE than skin a cat. Some of the instructions or tutorials are unhelpfully undated so I’m not sure if up to date.

So the short question is: what’s the best way to get my 4TB into PVE. And is my 1TB drive really 96% full?

I’m assuming that I will create my WMs on the 4TB drive and install a Nerthserver or two there.

Thanks!

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@DavidG

Hi

Cool that you’re up & running…

Your Disk may “appear” as full, but you’re forgetting the local-lvm…
Proxmox defaults:
-> Part of the disk (usually 100GB) are formatted as a “normal” OS disk volume. All the Rest is local-lvm. This space can be used for VMs / LXC (LinuX Containers). See in the GUI, on the right side under local-lvm. Most space is free! But is not mounted as a file system, this is a block storage device…

You can mount the 4 TB disk as needed (I’d do just one partition, XFS, easier for starters).

But to be honest, I advice using NAS storage (Faster, more flexible, and easier to handle if you’re not yet really into linux) !

See my WIP Proxmox Advice here:
https://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=userguide:nethserver_and_proxmox
Still work in progress, but you may gain a few insights… :slight_smile:

I’d suggest allocating 100 GB for starters for your NethServers, and enlarge as needed.

Andy

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In Proxmox create a new storage pool.
There are many different types of storage pools available. Do read the proxmox docs on this: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage

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