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LVM volumes on Proxmox VE

Today I'm going to introduce you to LVM volumes and how to add a thin provisioned volume to store your containers and virtual machines on Proxmox VE.

technonagib

• 4 min read
LVM volumes on Proxmox VE
pve proxmox proxmoxve lvm

Contents:

  • 1-What's LVM?
  • 2-Creating a volume group
  • 3-Creating a storage pool
  • 4-Adding LVM-Thin to PVE

1-What's LVM?

An LVM (Logical Volume Manager) lets you create and manage logical volumes.

Think of these as virtual disks, an abstraction of physical disks.

Among other things, you can:

  • Create multiple volumes within a storage pool
  • Format these volumes in different formats
  • Reduce or enlarge them without reformatting
  • Add physical disks to the storage pool

For further information.

lvm [Wiki ubuntu-fr]
Wiki ubuntu-frLa Documentation francophone

2-Creating a volume group

In this tutorial, I'm going to set up an LVM-Thin (Thin Provisioning) storage pool.

The advantage of LVM-Thin is that it allocates disk space in small quantities so, for example, instead of monopolizing 50 GB for a virtual machine's disk, the disk will reflect its actual size at time T (only the files written, not the final size).

Let's take a concrete example. I have a Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF (16 GB RAM, Xeon E3-1265l v3) with 3 disks:

  • sda: a 128 GB SSD, which is the main Proxmox VE drive
  • sdb: an 8TB hard disk which I use to store static data (videos, music, games etc.)
  • nvme0n1: the 480 GB NVME I've connected to the PC's PCIE port.

If I type the command "lsblk", I find all 3 disks.

I need this NVME to be able to store my containers and virtual machines, as well as to gain in performance when launching several simultaneously, as the PCIE port has a higher throughput than the SATA port.

So I'm going to create a volume group named "vg_thin", targeting the NVME located in /dev/nvme0n1".

vgcreate -s 32M vg_thin /dev/nvme0n1

If I type in the "vgs" command, I find the "vg_thin" group in the list in addition to the "pve" group I created when I installed the PVE server.

vgs

3-Creating the storage pool

Finally, I need to create a thin provisioning pool, which I'll call "homelab_pool".

It will monopolize the entire NVME and will be used to store containers as well as virtual machines.

lvcreate -L 465G --thinpool homelab_pool vg_thin

So I created

  • A volume group named "vg_thin"
  • A storage pool named "homelab_pool"

In another case, I could have :

  • Create two or three storage pools (150 GB each, 450 GB total)
  • Create volumes in these pools
  • Mount and format them in any format I wanted

But that's not the point of this tutorial, and PVE only recognizes volume groups (LVM) and storage pools (LVM-Thin) for storing virtual machines and containers.

4-Add LVM-Thin to PVE

Go to DatacenterStorageLVM-Thin.

  • ID: give your LVM-Thin a name
  • Volume group: the "vg_thin" group I created earlier
  • Thin Pool: the "homelab_pool" pool I've also created

Great!!!! LVM-Thin appears as storage space.

Setup Thin Provisioning Volumes in Logical Volume Management (LVM) - Part IV
Logical Volume management has great features such as snapshots and Thin Provisioning. In this article, we see how to setup thin Provisioning volumes in LVM.
Setup Thin Provisioning Volumes in Logical Volume Management (LVM) – Part IVBabin Lonston
Thin Provisioning in LVM2 - The Urban Penguin
In this blog and video we demonstrate how you can learn to use thin provisioning of volumes in LVM2. Making better space on your storage.
The Urban PenguinThe Urban Penguin

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