I have been testing LINSTOR for a while on my Proxmox Cluster from my Home Lab. Still, now I am just wondering if it is possible to use an NFS shared drive as the default storage option, for example, a Synology NFS shared for the LINSTOR cluster, where I would like to host all my Proxmox VMs. I tested the option linstor-gateway, but this one is to have a separate export for exporting data within or out of the cluster, so it is not the option that I was looking for.
What I am looking for is to have an NFS dedicated storage solution as the default for all my VMs within the Proxmox/LINSTOR Clusters, and how could I use this NFS as the linstor_storage (the one created by following the documentation) replacement in all three PVE Nodes?
I used the following Links to build the LINSTOR Cluster into my Proxmox Cluster
Please, any direction on this would be much appreciated.
You can configure your Proxmox cluster nodes to store VMs directly on your Synology NFS server, without using Linstor at all. Just add a new Proxmox storage of type “NFS” - there is an example here. (That particular example is using a Linstor Gateway NFS server, but you can use the same steps in Proxmox with any NFS server)
I don’t understand why you want to have Linstor store its data in a single NFS backend. The normal deployment of Linstor is to configure DRBD between separate nodes with local disk (with LVM or ZFS block storage), to replicate data and give you redundancy in case one node fails. Without that, it’s not serving any purpose.
The only reason I’ve come across for using Linstor without DRBD is if you have an esoteric storage system like NVMe-over-fabric, in which case Linstor acts as a sort of volume manager for remote access.
The documentation above references using LINSTOR in a hyper-converged deployment pattern, taking the local storage from each node and turning that storage into “shared-nothing” storage for the entire cluster. With our Proxmox plugin, you would never have to resort to using traditional storage options such as NFS, iSCSI, etc within Proxmox for VM disk storage.
Using LINSTOR Gateway for NFS is an easy way to take LINSTOR’s storage and expose highly available NFS from the LINSTOR cluster itself. You can use this “internally” (just for Proxmox, yes you can run VMs on NFS is you would really prefer to do so), or use it “externally” and connect other machnies to the NFS export, mount it from a client machine, etc.
use an NFS shared drive as the default storage option, for example, a Synology NFS shared for the LINSTOR cluster
As @candlerb pointed out, if you already have shared storage available for your cluster, simply use it as NFS storage in Proxmox. LINSTOR is not deployed “on top” of existing NFS, nor does it manage NFS from other sources, but instead it can be one of the building blocks for deploying highly available NFS or even building your own highly available SAN from commodity hardware.
