Shared storage is not absolutely necessary in a Proxmox cluster environment, but without a doubt it makes storage management a walk in the park. In a small business with an extremely limited budget and IT staff, a local storage system will suffice. But when data grows beyond several terabytes and keeps growing exponentially every month due to virtual machine backups, shared storage starts to make a whole lot of sense. In most enterprise virtual environments with critical data, shared storage is the only logical choice due to the benefits it brings to the whole cluster operation. The following are considered benefits of using shared storage: