Passing a Physical Drive through to a VM in ProxMox

[Music] hey guys welcome to how to do computers i'm mike and today we'll be looking at passing physical drives through to guest machines in proxmox there are a number of reasons you might want to do this for instance we have a file server here and we don't want all of the data being served to reside entirely in the vm's virtual hard drive that would make backing up the image extremely inefficient and we might also want the ability to extract data directly from the hard drive by simply removing it and accessing it from another computer if necessary giving a vm direct access to hardware can also improve performance by removing any additional overhead introduced from extra layers of abstraction in our case we have an extra one terabyte hard drive which i want to use to store media and other files to serve to other machines in our environment side note here any commands used in this video will be down in the description below so we already have our file server created and configured that would be svr fs01 i won't go over any initial setup instructions here you may need to have the vert i o iscsi drivers installed in order for it to detect the hard drive to do that go to proxmox's website download the vert i o wind drivers iso and then run the installer that is on the root of the disk i'll be sure to drop a link to that in the description as well so let's get started the first thing we need to know is which disk will be passing through so go ahead and go to your node and then go down to disks and then take note of which disk you want to pass through in our case it's dev sda and then also take note of the vm id of the vm that you want to pass the hard drive to our file server fs01 is vmid103 so now we'll go up to shell and then we'll enter the following command ls dash in slash dev disk slash by dash id this will give you a unique identifier for each disk we want to mount the uuid rather than the mount point on the off chance that the mount point changes which i've had happen before and it can cause some confusion so here we can see the scuzzy id for sda we will want to right click and copy that and then we'll enter another command slash sbin slash qm set and then the vmid which is one zero three dash vert i o two slash dev slash disk slash by dash id flash and then we'll paste in the disk id hit enter it looks like the disc was passed through you can double check by going to your virtual machine click on hardware and then down here we should see an additional hard disk has been mounted there's one more thing to do here after the hard drive has been mounted go ahead and double click to open up the properties and make sure that the check box next to backup is deselected otherwise when you run a backup job on this machine it will try to include this entire hard drive in the backup which will make the backup enormous and will defeat the entire purpose of having this separate hard drive passed through to the virtual machine in the first place hit ok and now we will go back up to the console and then if you open file explorer you'll see that the disk although it's been passed through to the machine is not showing up this is because we still need to make the disk available in windows partition manager so go down to the start menu right click and then go to disk management here you'll find the disk that's been passed through right click and then select online and then we'll go ahead and make a new simple volume hit next next let it assign the drive letter e next again leave it as ntfs and then we'll call the volume label data next and finish all right so now we should have full access to this hard drive and here we go the drive can now be directly accessed by the virtual machine and can be used as storage for the vm so that about wraps it up for now as always thanks for watching if you have any questions or if you run into any issues let me know down below and i will see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: H2DC - How to do Computers

Views: 60,023

Keywords: h2dc, how to do computers, how 2 do computers, proxmox, homelab, device passthrough, pass through, passing, through, passthrough, hard drive, physical drive, VM, Virtual Machine, virtualization, storage, drives, mount, local storage, local, hdd, ssd, proxmox ve

Id: U-UTMuhmC1U

Length: 4min 18sec (258 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 31 2021