Add Fractus Storage in Proxmox

Created by John K, Modified on Sat, 4 Feb, 2023 at 7:47 PM by John K

Credit for this guide goes to Flux community members Mowat and Gus Diaz. For any questions, please feel free to ask them in the community support section of Discord.

1. Open a command prompt page on windows base computer. Then enter "ssh root@"ip of your proxmox computer"
A) Enter password.
B) Look on your main node the ID for your disk. It usually comes as a device with sd_. were _ is the letter of the drive.
C) On your root directory enter the following command in order to initialize disk(s) that you are going to use.
D) Initialize Disk (for this sample we will initialize 3 disks (f, g, and h), then create a pool using the 3 drives) to initialize copy/paste the command and change only the letter of the drive to your specific drive letters.

sgdisk -N 1 /dev/sdf
sgdisk -N 1 /dev/sdg
sgdisk -N 1 /dev/sdh

E) Initialize vg (volume group) this vg will be called tdata1

vgcreate tdata1 /dev/sdf1 /dev/sdg1 /dev/sdh1

F) Create thin pool (this thin pool will be named lvtdada1 using the vg tdata1

lvcreate -n lvtdata1 -T -l 100%FREE tdata1

2. On Proxmox go to the main Datacenter page and add a storage. We will give it the name of thunderdata1 as a LMV-Thin, with the volume group tdata1 and the Thin Pool lvtdata1

3. Using proxmox, select cumulus node that you want to add the HDD. Under Hardware add the HDD as a SCSI drive with the storage thunderdata1 as a disk size of 10,000 (GiB)

4. Using Command Prompt sign using SSH to that same node that you just added the HDD drive. Do the following commands in order to create the virtual disk on the node.

sudo sgdisk -N 1 /dev/sdb
sudo mkfs.ext4 -E nodiscard /dev/sdb1        (this step might take several minutes)
sudo mkdir /thunder
sudo blkid                   (IMPORTANT Grab the UUID number (long number) for the new drive "
sudo nano /etc/fstab                                      (this will edit your fstab file)

You need to add this line on that window. Add the number of the disk "UUIDnumber" and delete the "". there needs to be a space between the number and the /thunder

UUID=<Add above UUID>"UUIDnumber" /thunder auto rw,user,auto 0 0

To save press together Ctrl+X - then "yes" to save, then enter to exit that window.

A) Run this command to mount it

sudo mount /thunder

B) Run this command to verify the disk. The disk with the total TB should appear on the last line.

df -h

5. Run a multitoolbox, option 11 and enable thunder

6. Reboot node and run benchmarks.

sudo reboot now

7. You can repeat steps 3-6 on other nodes until you use the entire virtual disk depending on the size of the disks that you attached together.