Proxmox VE Storage

A number of storages, and the QEMU image format qcow2, support thin provisioning. With thin provisioning activated, only the blocks that the guest system actually use will be written to the storage.

Say for instance you create a VM with a 32GB hard disk, and after installing the guest system OS, the root file system of the VM contains 3 GB of data. In that case only 3GB are written to the storage, even if the guest VM sees a 32GB hard drive. In this way thin provisioning allows you to create disk images which are larger than the currently available storage blocks. You can create large disk images for your VMs, and when the need arises, add more disks to your storage without resizing the VMs' file systems.

All storage types which have the “Snapshots” feature also support thin provisioning.

Each storage pool has a <type>, and is uniquely identified by its <STORAGE_ID>. A pool configuration looks like this:

The <type>: <STORAGE_ID> line starts the pool definition, which is then followed by a list of properties. Most properties require a value. Some have reasonable defaults, in which case you can omit the value.

To be more specific, take a look at the default storage configuration after installation. It contains one special local storage pool named local, which refers to the directory /var/lib/vz and is always available. The Proxmox VE installer creates additional storage entries depending on the storage type chosen at installation time.

A few storage properties are common among different storage types.

There exists an ownership relation for image type volumes. Each such volume is owned by a VM or Container. For example volume local:230/example-image.raw is owned by VM 230. Most storage backends encodes this ownership information into the volume name.

When you remove a VM or Container, the system also removes all associated volumes which are owned by that VM or Container.

Add storage pools

Disable storage pools

Enable storage pools

Change/set storage options

Remove storage pools. This does not delete any data, and does not disconnect or unmount anything. It just removes the storage configuration.

Allocate volumes

Allocate a 4G volume in local storage. The name is auto-generated if you pass an empty string as <name>

Free volumes

List storage status

List storage contents

List volumes allocated by VMID

List iso images

List container templates

Show file system path for a volume

Exporting the volume local:103/vm-103-disk-0.qcow2 to the file target. This is mostly used internally with pvesm import. The stream format qcow2+size is different to the qcow2 format. Consequently, the exported file cannot simply be attached to a VM. This also holds for the other formats.

This backend supports all common storage properties, and adds two additional properties. The path property is used to specify the directory. This needs to be an absolute file system path.

The optional content-dirs property allows for the default layout to be changed. It consists of a comma-separated list of identifiers in the following format:

Where vtype is one of the allowed content types for the storage, and path is a path relative to the mountpoint of the storage.

The above configuration defines a storage pool called backup. That pool can be used to store up to 7 regular backups (keep-last=7) and 3 protected backups per VM. The real path for the backup files is /mnt/backup/custom/backup/dir/....

This backend uses a well defined naming scheme for VM images:

When you create a VM template, all VM images are renamed to indicate that they are now read-only, and can be used as a base image for clones:

As mentioned above, most file systems do not support snapshots out of the box. To workaround that problem, this backend is able to use qcow2 internal snapshot capabilities.

Same applies to clones. The backend uses the qcow2 base image feature to create clones.

Please use the following command to allocate a 4GB image on storage local:

The real file system path is shown with:

And you can remove the image with:

The backend supports all common storage properties, except the shared flag, which is always set. Additionally, the following properties are used to configure the NFS server:

You can also set NFS mount options:

NFS does not support snapshots, but the backend uses qcow2 features to implement snapshots and cloning.

You can get a list of exported NFS shares with:

The backend supports all common storage properties, except the shared flag, which is always set. Additionally, the following CIFS special properties are available:

CIFS does not support snapshots on a storage level. But you may use qcow2 backing files if you still want to have snapshots and cloning features available.

You can get a list of exported CIFS shares with:

Then you could add this share as a storage to the whole Proxmox VE cluster with:

The backend supports all common storage properties, except the shared flag, which is always set. Additionally, the following special properties to Proxmox Backup Server are available:

Proxmox Backup Server only supports backups, they can be block-level or file-level based. Proxmox VE uses block-level for virtual machines and file-level for container.

Optionally, you can configure client-side encryption with AES-256 in GCM mode. Encryption can be configured either via the web interface, or on the CLI with the encryption-key option (see above). The key will be saved in the file /etc/pve/priv/storage/<STORAGE-ID>.enc, which is only accessible by the root user.

It is recommended that you keep your key safe, but easily accessible, in order for quick disaster recovery. For this reason, the best place to store it is in your password manager, where it is immediately recoverable. As a backup to this, you should also save the key to a USB flash drive and store that in a secure place. This way, it is detached from any system, but is still easy to recover from, in case of emergency. Finally, in preparation for the worst case scenario, you should also consider keeping a paper copy of your key locked away in a safe place. The paperkey subcommand can be used to create a QR encoded version of your key. The following command sends the output of the paperkey command to a text file, for easy printing.

Additionally, it is possible to use a single RSA master key pair for key recovery purposes: configure all clients doing encrypted backups to use a single public master key, and all subsequent encrypted backups will contain a RSA-encrypted copy of the used AES encryption key. The corresponding private master key allows recovering the AES key and decrypting the backup even if the client system is no longer available.

Because the encryption is managed on the client side, you can use the same datastore on the server for unencrypted backups and encrypted backups, even if they are encrypted with different keys. However, deduplication between backups with different keys is not possible, so it is often better to create separate datastores.

Then you could add this share as a storage to the whole Proxmox VE cluster with:

The backend supports all common storage properties, and adds the following GlusterFS specific options:

The directory layout and the file naming conventions are inherited from the dir backend.

The storage provides a file level interface, but no native snapshot/clone implementation.

The backend supports the common storage properties content, nodes, disable, and the following ZFS specific properties:

The backend uses the following naming scheme for VM images:

ZFS is probably the most advanced storage type regarding snapshot and cloning. The backend uses ZFS datasets for both VM images (format raw) and container data (format subvol). ZFS properties are inherited from the parent dataset, so you can simply set defaults on the parent dataset.

It is recommended to create an extra ZFS file system to store your VM images:

To enable compression on that newly allocated file system:

You can get a list of available ZFS filesystems with:

The LVM backend supports the common storage properties content, nodes, disable, and the following LVM specific properties:

The backend use basically the same naming conventions as the ZFS pool backend.

LVM is a typical block storage, but this backend does not support snapshots and clones. Unfortunately, normal LVM snapshots are quite inefficient, because they interfere with all writes on the entire volume group during snapshot time.

One big advantage is that you can use it on top of a shared storage, for example, an iSCSI LUN. The backend itself implements proper cluster-wide locking.

List available volume groups:

The LVM thin backend supports the common storage properties content, nodes, disable, and the following LVM specific properties:

The backend use basically the same naming conventions as the ZFS pool backend.

LVM thin is a block storage, but fully supports snapshots and clones efficiently. New volumes are automatically initialized with zero.

It must be mentioned that LVM thin pools cannot be shared across multiple nodes, so you can only use them as local storage.

List available LVM thin pools on volume group pve:

The backend supports the common storage properties content, nodes, disable, and the following iSCSI specific properties:

The iSCSI protocol does not define an interface to allocate or delete data. Instead, that needs to be done on the target side and is vendor specific. The target simply exports them as numbered LUNs. So Proxmox VE iSCSI volume names just encodes some information about the LUN as seen by the linux kernel.

iSCSI is a block level type storage, and provides no management interface. So it is usually best to export one big LUN, and setup LVM on top of that LUN. You can then use the LVM plugin to manage the storage on that iSCSI LUN.

Scan a remote iSCSI portal, and returns a list of possible targets:

The user mode iSCSI backend uses the same configuration options as the Open-iSCSI backed.

This backend supports the common storage properties nodes, disable, content, and the following rbd specific properties:

If you use cephx authentication, which is enabled by default, you need to provide the keyring from the external Ceph cluster.

To configure the storage via the CLI, you first need to make the file containing the keyring available. One way is to copy the file from the external Ceph cluster directly to one of the Proxmox VE nodes. The following example will copy it to the /root directory of the node on which we run it:

Then use the pvesm CLI tool to configure the external RBD storage, use the --keyring parameter, which needs to be a path to the keyring file that you copied. For example:

When configuring an external RBD storage via the GUI, you can copy and paste the keyring into the appropriate field.

The keyring will be stored at

Connecting to an external Ceph storage doesn’t always allow setting client-specific options in the config DB on the external cluster. You can add a ceph.conf beside the Ceph keyring to change the Ceph client configuration for the storage.

The ceph.conf needs to have the same name as the storage.

See the RBD configuration reference
[RBD configuration reference https://docs.ceph.com/en/quincy/rbd/rbd-config-ref/]
for possible settings.

The rbd backend is a block level storage, and implements full snapshot and clone functionality.

This backend supports the common storage properties nodes, disable, content, as well as the following cephfs specific properties:

If you use cephx authentication, which is enabled by default, you need to provide the secret from the external Ceph cluster.

To configure the storage via the CLI, you first need to make the file containing the secret available. One way is to copy the file from the external Ceph cluster directly to one of the Proxmox VE nodes. The following example will copy it to the /root directory of the node on which we run it:

Then use the pvesm CLI tool to configure the external RBD storage, use the --keyring parameter, which needs to be a path to the secret file that you copied. For example:

When configuring an external RBD storage via the GUI, you can copy and paste the secret into the appropriate field.

The secret is only the key itself, as opposed to the rbd backend which also contains a [client.userid] section.

The secret will be stored at

A secret can be received from the Ceph cluster (as Ceph admin) by issuing the command below, where userid is the client ID that has been configured to access the cluster. For further information on Ceph user management, see the Ceph docs.
[cephusermgmt]

The cephfs backend is a POSIX-compliant filesystem, on top of a Ceph cluster.

^[1] While no known bugs exist, snapshots are not yet guaranteed to be stable, as they lack sufficient testing.

This backend is configured similarly to the directory storage. Note that when adding a directory as a BTRFS storage, which is not itself also the mount point, it is highly recommended to specify the actual mount point via the is_mountpoint option.

For example, if a BTRFS file system is mounted at /mnt/data2 and its pve-storage/ subdirectory (which may be a snapshot, which is recommended) should be added as a storage pool called data2, you can use the following entry:

When taking a snapshot of a subvolume or raw file, the snapshot will be created as a read-only subvolume with the same path followed by an @ and the snapshot’s name.

In order to use the ZFS over iSCSI plugin you need to configure the remote machine (target) to accept ssh connections from the Proxmox VE node. Proxmox VE connects to the target for creating the ZVOLs and exporting them via iSCSI. Authentication is done through a ssh-key (without password protection) stored in /etc/pve/priv/zfs/<target_ip>_id_rsa

The following steps create a ssh-key and distribute it to the storage machine with IP 192.0.2.1:

The backend supports the common storage properties content, nodes, disable, and the following ZFS over ISCSI specific properties:

The ZFS over iSCSI plugin provides a shared storage, which is capable of snapshots. You need to make sure that the ZFS appliance does not become a single point of failure in your deployment.