Key component 1 – shared storage

In order to ensure HA, we must not have a single point of failure, which means each virtual machine should be able to be accessed by multiple Proxmox servers. If there is one failed Proxmox server, there should be another server to handle the associated VM. Therefore, we should not store our VMs in local storage; we should store them on shared storage. In a modern technology environment, network storage is commonly used as shared storage, which has led to the coining of the terms, storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS).

Characteristics of SAN and NAS

Storage area network (SAN) is mounted as block-level storage. The commonly used protocols to mount a SAN device are iSCSI and fibre channel. When the storage is mounted, it appears as a local disk inside the system, allowing the operating system to manage its filesystem. Based on this characteristic, the storage is expected to be permanently attached to the operating system. The...