Introduction

Over the past six months, I’ve been building, and destroying, a large number of Containers and Virtual Machines (VM). I’ve now arrived at several I actually want to keep.

The problem is that when I was setting them up, I completely mishandled storage planning, at least in the long run.

All the VMs and Containers I was building and deleting on my Proxmox VE server were basically tests. Each one was set up with its own storage assumptions, without an overall plan.

In the end, several of these were worth keeping, but my storage planning (or lack there of) wasn’t. I allocated a lot of storage unevenly; Plex got 1 TB, Kiwix got 1 TB, File Browser got 512 GB, and Calibre server got 256 GB.

None of those services have ever got close to their allocated space. On average they were running with less than 50% space utilization. So I effectively limited myself from using approximately 1.5 TB of storage tied up in my various Servers.

The fix is to consolidate storage by moving most data to a single file server, and have the other VMs access it for their content.

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