Table of Contents

How to set up your Storage Slab

BuyVM offers storage slabs for all KVM Slice customers in all locations.

Storage slabs cost $5 per TB and are running on enterprise 7200RPM hard drives with an NVME cache and a 40Gbit+ InfiniBand to give you near local storage performance. A storage slab is simply like an extra hard drive for your KVM Slice.

How to setup a storage slab on Linux

WARNING, please make sure you follow this guide correctly or you risk wiping your boot drive.

Step 1) Attach the slab to your desired KVM slice in the Storage Volumes section in Stallion.

Step 2) Run sudo lsblk -o name,vendor,model,size to find out what the device path is for the slab you've just attached. 

$ sudo lsblk -o name,vendor,model,size

NAME   VENDOR   MODEL             SIZE
sda    BUYVM    SLAB                250G
sr0    QEMU     QEMU DVD-ROM     1024M
vda    0x1af4                      10G
├─vda1                            9.5G
└─vda2                            512M

In this case, you can see that the sda device has the vendor “BUYVM” and the model “SLAB” with a size of 250GB. This means that the device path will be /dev/sda.

Step 3) Now that you've identified your slab's device path, you need to create a partition on your slab. To do this, you will be using parted. Please note that parted might not be installed by default on some systems. You should be able to install it with your system's package manager.

First, you're going to create the GUID Partition Table (GPT). To do this, run the following command: 

parted /dev/sda mklabel gpt

This will create the GPT on /dev/sda.

Now, you're going to create the actual partition. To do this, run the following command: 

parted /dev/sda mkpart primary 0% 100%

This will create a partition using the entire slab's storage capacity.

Step 4) Run sudo lsblk -o name,vendor,model,size again to see the new partition you just created (which should be /dev/sda1). 

$ sudo lsblk -o name,vendor,model,size
NAME   VENDOR   MODEL             SIZE
sda    BUYVM    SLAB                250G
└─sda1
sr0    QEMU     QEMU DVD-ROM     1024M
vda    0x1af4                      10G
├─vda1                            9.5G
└─vda2                            512M

Step 5) Now, you need to format the slab to have an actual filesystem. The most common filesystem is ext4 so I will be using that in this guide. To create an ext4 filesystem on your slab, run 

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda1

This might take a few seconds depending on the size of your slab.

Step 6) Now you are going to prepare to mount the slab. To do this, you're going to need to run a few commands to figure out the UUID of the device.

First, you need to determine the slab's UUID. You can do that by running: 

blkid

In this case, the device you're looking for is /dev/sda1. The line should look like: 

/dev/sda1: UUID="1cb43a43-105c-46f1-9d7f-1c736c10ffdf" TYPE="ext4"

Now, you're going to add the slab's UUID to /etc/fstab so your slab will automatically mount when your server is booted. Open up /etc/fstab with your favorite text editor. At the end of the file, you will need to add the following line: 

UUID=1cb43a43-105c-46f1-9d7f-1c736c10ffdf /mnt/slab ext4 defaults 0 0

This tells the system that /dev/sda1 (1cb43a43-105c-46f1-9d7f-1c736c10ffdf) should be mounted at /mnt/slab. You can change /mnt/slab to another directory if you'd like. 

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/vda1 during installation
UUID=813b9d75-c617-4db0-b0f2-6758d17b31f4 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# swap was on /dev/vda2 during installation
UUID=a1103972-6b3e-49d1-ac18-d6bf16ea0f68 none            swap    sw              0       0
#SLAB
UUID=1cb43a43-105c-46f1-9d7f-1c736c10ffdf /mnt/slab ext4 defaults 0 0

Step 7) Creating the mount point

You're almost there! One of the last things you need to do is create the mount point. In this guide, /mnt/slab is being used as the mount point. So, run: 

mkdir /mnt/slab/

This will create the directory for the slab to be mounted at and it will be the path you use to access the slab.

Step 8) Mounting the Slab! 

mount -a

This will mount the device you just added in /etc/fstab at /mnt/slab/. You can check out the newly mounted slab with df -h. 

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
[...]
/dev/sda1       251G  81M   250G 1% /mnt/slab
[...]

How to setup a Storage Slab on Microsoft Windows

WARNING, please make sure you follow this guide correctly or you risk wiping your boot drive.

This guide should work on Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016 and 2019.

To setup your storage slab on Windows you need to make sure that the Slab is attached on the Stallion.

Once you have attached it follow these steps.

  1. Go to the Start Menu (Windows logo on the taskbar)
  2. Type “Disk Management” and open it
  3. You will see a Window that pops up that says “Initialize Disk” and the storage slab should show up as “Disk 1”
  4. Select the disk, and click OK
  5. The disk will then show up on Disk Management
  6. Right click on the unallocated space where your storage slab is and click “New Simple Volume”.
  7. After you've clicked “New Simple Volume” a setup wizard will show up. Assign the drive letter you want or mount it in empty folder.
  8. Click next, format the drive as NTFS, quick format and you can label the drive whatever you want to then click next.
  9. After that the drive should be formatted and will show up in File Explorer