In this post, I would like to show you the steps that you need to take in order to add an additional hard disk to a VM in Proxmox VE. If you do not know how to create a virtual machine (VM) in Proxmox VE, check this tutorial.

Proxmox Virtual Environment is an open source server virtualization management solution based on QEMU/KVM and LXC. It is a type 1 hypervisor that can run different operating systems like Linux and/or Windows. Proxmox Virtual Environment is running on top of the Debian Linux distribution. For more information, check this page.

Select the VM which does not have enough space

Login to your Proxmox VE and select the VM which does not have enough space and for which you want to add a new hard disk.

In my lab, I will use the VM with ID 101 as an example. This VM is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. The same steps should be taken for any VM. It does not matter which operating system the VM is running.

Select the Hardware tab

After you have identified the right VM, select it. You will see in the centre of the page a panel with multiple options dedicated to this VM. In the above screenshot, you see the Summary page. Go to the Hardware tab and press the Add button.

After you pressed the Add button, select the Hard Disk option.

Add the Hard Disk and specify its details

After you selected the Hard Disk option, a new window is displayed.

Specify the storage

In the new window, you need to select the storage. In my lab, the Proxmox VE is configured with a 2TB SSD. The new virtual hard disk will be created and will use this storage.

Specify the hard disk size

Specify the hard disk size. By default 32 GiB is configured, but you can increase or decrease this size according to your needs.

I will increase the hard disk size to 50 GiB.

Press the Add button from the Add: Hard Disk page

After you are happy with the configured details for your new hard disk, press the Add button to create the new hard disk and attach it to the VM.

As you can see from the above screenshot, the new hard disk was created and attached to the VM. The VM has 2 hard disks at the moment. Both of them have the 50 GiB size.

Confirm from the OS that the new hard disk is available

The last step is to confirm from the operating system that the new hard disk was created and attached to the VM. You can log in to your VM, by choosing the Console tab or by using the SSH command to connect remotely to it.

If your VM is running Linux, run a similar command to confirm that the new hard disk is attached to the VM. In my case the device /dev/sdb was created and attached to the VM.

[petru@rhel9 ~]$ lsblk
NAME          MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda             8:0    0   50G  0 disk 
├─sda1          8:1    0    1G  0 part /boot
└─sda2          8:2    0   49G  0 part 
  ├─rhel-root 253:0    0   44G  0 lvm  /
  └─rhel-swap 253:1    0    5G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
sdb             8:16   0   50G  0 disk 
sr0            11:0    1  8.9G  0 rom  /run/media/petru/RHEL-9-2-0-BaseOS-x86_64
[petru@rhel9 ~]$ 

That’s it! You have learned how to create and attach a new virtual hard disk to your VM in Proxmox Virtual Environment. If you found this blog post helpful, please like and subscribe for more Linux tutorials. Thank you for reading it!