How do I format a hard drive to use for virtual machines in Proxmox?
I have a Proxmox node running on a 250GB SSD with a 4TB hard drive in the same system connected via SATA. Proxmox sees the disk but I do not know how to format it so that I can use it for a Windows Server VM. This is the output of fdisk -l in the Proxmox shell:
Disk /dev/sdb: 3.7 TiB, 4000787030016 bytes, 7814037168 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: gpt Disk identifier: F8ADEAD7-4562-11E2-B324-0007430949EA Device Start End Sectors Size Type /dev/sdb1 2048 4982527 4980480 2.4G Linu /dev/sdb2 4982528 9176831 4194304 2G Linu /dev/sdb3 9437184 7813832351 7804395168 3.6T Linu
You can do it in a lot of different ways: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage
You don't format hard drive space for virtual machines in proxmox by default generally. Proxmox will create a block level device when you create the virtual machine and you do not need to do any formatting. You do have to setup a pool, but you let Proxmox deal with the individual "raw" files from there. You can of course be more complex and use all sorts of different stuff instead, but if you're starting out, "raw drives" will give you the best performance and are the default way of things.
Is the issue that you don't see this disk inside the proxmox gui?
For that you have to format it and then select it for vm storage in the gui.
Not sure I understand the question. If this is the datastore disk and not the disk where Proxmox actually lives, erase all existing partitions and format with whatever filesystem you want?
https://www.hostfav.com/blog/index.php/2017/02/01/add-a-new-physical-hard-drive-to-proxmox-ve-4x-5x/
This looks like what you want
Id just make one large partition on the drive. Then Id personally put zfs on it, and add the zfs to proxmox, then you can make a virtual drive for your vm.
You don't format a physical disk for the intended guest operating system's File system in a hypervisor. you simply add it to a datastore and spin up the VM inside it.
Aside from all the helpful info here, you would be much better served by running any VMs from SSDs then mechanical drives, especially a single drive. I would add VMs to your Proxmox install drive if you don't have others to use.