Lvm vs lvm thin provisioning. Hey All- Probably seems li...

Lvm vs lvm thin provisioning. Hey All- Probably seems like common sense but wanted to double check… I have several exported VMDKs from ESXi - and my understanding is that I can convert these to qcow2 and then take advantage of disk resizing/thin provisioning after they are imported and assigned to the VM. 2 LVM2 snapshots and thin You could also manually create a thick LVM and parallel a thin LVM and add PVE Storages for both. thin provisioning and how to shrink thin-provisioned virtual disks in Linux and Windows. Preparations Install LVM utilities. LVM Thin Pools are a powerful storage option for Proxmox VE, offering over-provisioning capabilities and efficient space utilization. If you want an advice - use LVM Thin with a slice for Directory storage usage on a side. This guide shows you how to create an LVM Thin Pool from multiple disks and add it to Proxmox for VM and container storage. Introduction to VDO on LVM The Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) feature provides inline block-level deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning for storage. But all your data is still encrypted, so thats secure enough for me. 3 Listing thin pools and thin logical volumes 4. The virtual disk will always be presented as a file. 1 Creating a thin pool 4. With thin provisioning activated, only the blocks that the guest system actually use will be written to the storage. ZFS: ZFS is a beast — it’s both a file system and a volume manager, with built-in features like snapshots, compression, and data integrity. Feb 2, 2026 · Proxmox with LVM-thin and why we should use Trim/Discard Excerpts from the Proxmox VE Administration Guide] LVM normally allocates blocks when you create a volume. 89 back in 2012, with redhat 6. 6 Remove LV 4 Features 4. If you only look for performance, no matter which features are available, the answer is LVM (traditional). They serve different purposes — but LVMTHIN(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual LVMTHIN(7) NAME top lvmthin — LVM thin provisioning DESCRIPTION top Blocks in a standard lvm(8) Logical Volume (LV) are allocated when the LV is created, but blocks in a thin provisioned LV are allocated as they are written. 3. Oct 31, 2025 · 5. - I see that pve use lvm-thin by default. Yes, thin-provisioning is always not that secure on an encrypted disk because you can see whats empty and what encrypted. 4 I believe. In this article, we’ll take a deep This post describes the differences between LVM and LVM-thin in Proxmox VE and explains how to set up both with two methods. 02. In this article, we see how to setup thin Provisioning volumes in LVM. Today's guide shows you how to keep an eye on things with an introduction to LVM thin provisions and monitoring disk use with Diskover, lvs, and Grafana utilities. This uses LVM-thin provisioning, which allocates disk space from the NVMe pool on demand rather than pre-allocating full VM disk sizes. 3. You can use the normal LVM command-line tools to manage and create LVM thin pools (see man lvmthin for details). This behaviour is called thin-provisioning, because volumes can be much larger than physically available space. This should also solve the initial vhd sparse file growth write performance penalty LVM-thin (block / raw) vs. LVM normally allocates blocks when you create a volume. Currently, all our VMs are backed via iSCSI on a separate storage cluster. ” 2. On the other hand, QCOW2 allows you to create a "thin provisioning" disc; that is, you can create a virtual disk of 8GiB, but its actual size will not be 8GiB. It is important that you monitor the thin pool and add more capacity when it starts to become full. Objective is to have those two NVMEs in a mirror and they will contain VMs for production. A pool of VMs provisioned with 50GB disks each may only actually use 200GB of NVMe space if most VMs have sparse data. $ sudo apt install lvm2 Initialize physical volume. Compare ZFS and LVM for local storage in Proxmox VE. Then you could split the disk a bit and use thin provisioning for some of them. Using thin provisioning, you can manage a storage pool of free space, known as a thin pool, which can be allocated to an arbitrary number of devices when needed by applications. Not a single problem, except when we updated to CentOS 7. Jan 10, 2026 · Dive into the differences between classic LVM and LVM-Thin: provisioning strategies, performance, pros and cons, snapshot behavior, monitoring needs, and guidance on when to choose each option. Thin provisioning is a great feature but you only gonna get what your maximum available space is. In most cases you wouldnt want to use LVM as that wont give you thin provisioning or snapshots. 8. From this pool, you create multiple thin-provisioned volumes (“thin volumes”). LVM thin pools instead allocates blocks when they are written. LVM Group (network backing with iSCSI targets) iSCSI target NFS Share CIFS Share Ceph RBD CephFS Directly use iSCSI LUNs or Fibre Attached SANs. $ sudo pvcreate /dev/sdb Physical volume "/dev/sdb" successfully created. You need to perform some extra steps (carve out some space) for the ISOs. The size of the virtual disk can be greater than the available space in the thin pool. Meta%: The percentage of space used by metadata (for thin provisioning). Because of this, a thin provisioned LV has a virtual size that can be much larger than the available physical storage. If you want advanced storage, ZFS is the way to go. I have noticed that the current version of Proxmox defaults to using Thin Pools for LVM storage, and they are a little trickier to setup with LUKS than classic fs-formatted volumes (you can't mount/access a thin pool as a directory afaik). This behavior is called thin-provisioning, because volumes can be much larger than physically available space. What are the tradeoffs between btfs, lvm, and lvm with thin provisioning WRT speed and space efficiency? If you're not monitoring your server's storage use, it can quickly run away from you. 1 Thin provisioning 4. Thin LVM Overview What is Thin Provisioning? Thin provisioning allows LVM to allocate physical storage on demand rather than reserving it upfront. PVE纵览-选择适合你的Proxmox VE存储方案：LVM、LVM-Thin、目录与ZFS对，在ProxmoxVirtualEnvironment（PVE）中，存储管理涉及多种技术，包括LVM、LVM-Thin、目录和ZFS。LVM提供灵活的逻辑卷管理， LVM has supported thin provisioning since release 2. Its exact size will increase as data is added to the virtual disk. 8 Removing thin pools 4. 1. Create a volume group. LVM thin provisioning allows you to create virtual disks inside a thin pool. Configure and use LVM thin provisioning. 10. Thin vs thick provisioning: Optimize your storage efficiency and costs with this in-depth comparison guide. Thick vs. In this post we will try to understand thick and thin provisioning from the perspective of KVM The concept of thick and thin provisioning relates to how disk space is allocated for virtual machines. With thin provisioning enabled, OpenEBS CSI driver creates thin volume by picking appropriate node based on scheduling attributes including topology information (specified in the SC and in the plugin), matching VG name, available capacity as well as node labels. 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. 💾 Proxmox VE Storage: Why I Removed local-lvm and Simplified Local Storage Proxmox VE installs with two default local storage types: local and local-lvm. . Tyler Carrigan's article Creating Logical Volumes in Linux with LVM has some good information on striping and mirroring Logical Volumes. Pros: Supports Proxmox snapshots and clones Thin provisioning (space-efficient) Faster VM deployment Cons: Not shared No RAID or replication More difficult to back up externally Example Use Case: Developers testing many VMs with frequent snapshotting You can create file systems which are larger than the available physical storage. In this way thin provisioning allows you to create disk images which are larger than the currently available storage blocks. I think that with good monitoring on the services and taking care of them, is more manageable than having vast amount of data, that needs to be cleaned up. I’m using thin provisioning on a multi-path, multi-storage and multi-hv environment for years (think of shared PV, several VGs, one or more LV per VM). As organizations increasingly adopt Proxmox VE as a powerful, cost-effective alternative to proprietary virtualization platforms, it's essential to understand its storage provisioning models—especially thin vs thick provisioning. Learn which option fits your VM needs. But you only have 2 liters Thin vs thick provisioning explained with pros, cons, and use cases across virtualized and cloud environments, and how Nutanix supports both. Learn which strategy is right for you! Logical Volume management has great features such as snapshots and Thin Provisioning. We would like to use the same backing storage when we move to Proxmox, but it seems that Proxmox doesn't support LVM-thin provisioning or snapshots when using an iSCSI backend. If you want to have snapshots and thin provisioning, we used to recommend LVM-thin before ZFS since, for a long time, ZFS could not keep up with the performance provided by modern NVMe drives. The If you're not monitoring your server's storage use, it can quickly run away from you. Good 🪣 Thin Provisioning in LVM Complete Step by Step Tutorial 🪣 Buckets of Water Example Imagine you have 3 friends. Thin volumes are useful for overprovisioning especially for containers. For detailed information on LVM thin provisioning as well as information on using the LVM commands and utilities with thinly-provisioned logical volumes, see the lvmthin (7) man page. file based QCOW2? I'm really confused here, maybe due to my mostly Windows Server based experience (20+ years), but I also kinda followed Linux since the 90s So here the default install creates an LVM-thin partition and Proxmox puts the Guest OS disks there. Is thin provisioning in LVM-based storage risky for storage management? Thin provisioning allows you to allocate more storage than physically available, which can be efficient but requires careful monitoring. Thin LVM snapshots When talking about LVM, we have to distinguish between traditional (“thick”) and thin logical volumes and snapshots. Choosing the right one can significantly impact performance, storage efficiency, backup strategy, and long-term scalability. 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. LVM-Thin Best for: VMs that benefit from snapshot support and thin provisioning. Learn which option best suits your infrastructure, performance goals, and recovery strategy. Origin: The original volume if the LV is a snapshot (empty if not a snapshot). You can then create devices that can be bound to the thin pool for later allocation when an application actually writes to the logical volume. LVM Thin: This is a more advanced form of LVM that supports thin provisioning and snapshots, making it great for VM storage. 2 Creating a thin logical volume 4. We talked in detail about LVM thin provisioning in a recent article; here, in few words, we can say that the main difference between thick and thin volumes, is how space is allocated. $ sudo vgcreate vg01 /dev/sdb Volume group "vg01 Yes, thin-provisioning is always not that secure on an encrypted disk because you can see whats empty and what encrypted. 4. Data%: The percentage of the LV’s space that is used by data. A step-by-step guide to creating and managing thin pools and volumes for efficient storage. Like seriously - I was watching tutorials that were out of date and I am stuck. Good A number of storages, and the QEMU image format qcow2, support thin provisioning. 7 Reducing a thin logical volume 4. 2. 5 Extending a thin logical volume 4. Each one asks you for a 1-liter bucket of water. If you choose anything else and ZFS, you will get a thin pool for the guest storage by default. 6 Reducing a thin pool 4. For last few days I am trying to understand what is an equivalent of Thin provisioning on ZFS and how to configure it. Understanding LVM-Thin Provisioning LVM-Thin (Logical Volume Manager - Thin Provisioning) is a storage technology in Proxmox that allows you to allocate storage space flexibly and efficiently. Each thin volume appears large to the guest OS but only consumes real space when data is written. You can create virtual volumes larger than the available physical space — actual space is used only when data is written. Here are some best practices to ensure efficient disk usage and performance: 1. Also, this format allows the creation of "snapshot". 6 and LVM corrupted the internal metadata. 4 Extending a thin pool 4. Do you plan to support "LVM classic" in future release or just lvm-thin ? What the installer sets up as default depends on the target file system. LVM also supports RAID configurations, mirroring, and other advanced settings that make it an even more attractive solution. VDO volumes on LVM (LVM-VDO) contain the following components: Pool: The name of the thin pool if the LV is part of a thin provisioning setup. Storage Considerations: LVM Thin Provisioning If you’re using LVM thin provisioning, which is a great option for managing disk space efficiently, it’s essential to ensure that performance does In Proxmox, create a local-lvm storage pool pointing at the NVMe drive. You create an LV designated as a “thin pool. Learn about advantages and disadvantages of thick vs. You can manage VDO as a type of Logical Volume Manager (LVM) Logical Volumes (LVs), similar to LVM thin-provisioned volumes. LVM/Thin is block based in its default state. For ISO you need file based storage. Feb 1, 2024 · Learn LVM thin provisioning in Linux. You could also manually create a thick LVM and parallel a thin LVM and add PVE Storages for both. Feb 9, 2026 · How Does Thin Provisioning Change Things? With LVM-thin, after creating your PV and VG: 1. yv1ajv, piyk9, dszs, elso, ojtx, h9rxh, c5gqap, vlsr, szjyi, ood6yp,