[PVE-User] Access disk space from multiple VMs. Is that possible?

[Tom H. Lautenbacher]

Hello José

On 2012-01-24 14:06, José Román Bilbao wrote:

> I forgot to mention that we did this for the shake of simplicity on
> volumes management nice GUI based on http).

Thank you for the recommendation of openfiler. I will check it out.

> But it could also be done
> using the Proxmox underlying Linux by sharing the partition using iSCSI
> or NFS.

That sounds even more interesting to me, since it seems to be the 
simplest method, and I prefer simplicity.

@NFS: Ok, this is pretty straight forward. Proxmox mounts the data 
partition to itself and then shares it in the network via NFS.

@iSCSI: I have very limited knowledge about iSCSI. How would the concept 
be? Is the following correct:

- Proxmox has the possibility to act as an iSCSI initiator and accesses 
the data partition, uses it as an iSCSI target and shares it to the 
network? The other VMs would then access this shares with an iSCSI client?

> As the other protocols you mention are file-based it should be
> ok to share the same partition using different protocols through a VM as
> the underlying OS is managing the "real" storage. At least this is my
> opinion...

Yes, sure, I could install an OS on the data partition and then start 
sharing with multiple protocols, NFS, SMB, FTP, HTTP, etc..
But my intention is right the opposite:
I want to have separate VMs that each of them serves SMB, FTP, HTTP, 
etc. to the network, but they take their data from a centralized data 
store (aka "Datastorage A"). And my question is how to have such an 
datastore, without installing any services on it.

I actually thought that maybe Proxmox has such a feature on it's own.
But as it seems, iSCSI could be what I was searching for?!

Thank you for your time to help me!

Tom