In simple terms, shared storage is a medium to store data for simultaneous access by multiple devices or nodes in a network. As server and desktop virtualizations become the norm, shared storage today is much more critical for a virtual environment.

In Chapter 1, Dive into the Virtual World with Proxmox, we set up our cluster with NFS file sharing using FreeNAS or any other operating system you may have chosen. Although a Proxmox cluster can fully function with Direct Attached Storage (DAS) or a local storage system in the same Proxmox node, shared storage system has many benefits in a production environment, such as increased manageability, seamless storage expansion, and redundancy just to name a few. In this chapter, we are going to look at the following topics: