Proxmox Shared Storage

Why use Shared Storage on Proxmox?

Shared storage on Proxmox, as with many other Hypervisor environments, provides a few benefits:

• It reduces the need for duplication of some data resources you may want to share between hosts - eg shared ISO installers.
• It can be used for migration purposes between hosts.
• It can be used as part of high availability / failover storage between hosts.

Shared storage on Proxmox can be used for all of these things - it is useful in a home lab, and essential in production deployment.

There are several options available - SMB/CIFS, Ceph, iSCSI and so on, but if you want something simple, NFS can be a good solution.

NFS setup

NFS server setups are well documented, and are even be built into some NAS devices, so are not documented here.

The NFS client is very easy to set up in Proxmox.

Under “Datacentre” click on “Storage”, then “Add” and “NFS” in the drop down menu.

You can then fill in the details - the ID field determines what the share will be named as, whilst the IP address or hostname will be needed before the Export drop down is populated.

You can choose which content the share is used for - eg Disk Images, backups and so on - and also specify which hosts (nodes) have access to the share.

At this point, the NFS storage will appear in the storage menus within proxmox and can be used for the relevant storage types you have selected.

Video Demonstration

The setup can also be seen on YouTube here: