Storage¶

Various storage technologies are combined to take advantage of their respective strengths.

Physical storage¶

Storage roughly falls into three categories:

• Fast system storage
  • Hypervisor OS
• Fast data storage
  • Container/VM images
  • Application data
• Slow data storage
  • Multimedia/misc
  • Proxmox Backup Server backend

Common storage configuration¶

All physical storage devices use a partitionless layout where dm-crypt encrypts the raw block device and a btrfs filesystem is applied on top of that. The exception to this is the primary system drive, which has unencrypted boot and efi partitions (detailed below).

graph LR
A[block] --> B[dm-crypt];
B --> C[btrfs];

Fast system storage¶

• Unencrypted /boot (btrfs) and /boot/efi (fat32) partitions
• Encrypted / (btrfs) partition follows the common storage configuration

Fast data storage¶

• Follows common storage configuration

Slow data storage¶

• One btrfs filesystem per physical (rotational) drive follows common storage configuration
• Btrfs filesystems pooled by mergerfs

graph LR
A[btrfs] --> B[SnapRAID];
B --> A;
A --> C[mergerfs];