Concepts

Storage Profiles

Map Proxmox storage pools to zones with configurable I/O limits. Abstract away Ceph, ZFS, or LVM behind named profiles with predictable performance.

Storage profiles abstract away the details of where and how VM disks are stored. Similar to storage policies in VMware vSAN or storage classes in Kubernetes, they provide a consistent storage experience across zones, even when the underlying Proxmox storage pools differ from one cluster to another.

Understand storage profiles

A storage profile has three components:

A name: a human-readable label like "Standard", "Performance", or "Archive".
Zone-to-pool mappings: which Proxmox storage pool to use in each zone.
I/O limits: read and write throughput caps in MB/s.

Performance

eu-centralnvme-pool

eu-northssd-pool

Read500 MB/s

Write400 MB/s

Standard

eu-centrallocal-lvm

eu-northlocal-lvm

Read200 MB/s

Write150 MB/s

Economy

eu-centralhdd-pool

eu-northhdd-pool

Read50 MB/s

Write30 MB/s

This design solves a real problem: your Frankfurt cluster might have NVMe storage pools named nvme-pool, while your Helsinki cluster has the same hardware but named ssd-fast. Without storage profiles, users would need to know the pool names per zone. With profiles, they just pick "Performance" and the orchestrator resolves the correct pool for the target zone.

Map zones to storage pools

Navigate to Platform > Storage Profiles in the portal. Here you can create, view, and delete profiles.

The storage profiles settings page The Storage Profiles page shows all profiles with their zone-to-pool mappings and I/O limits.

When creating a profile, you specify a name, the zone-to-pool mappings, and optional read/write I/O limits.

A storage profile must have a mapping for every zone where you want to use it. If a user tries to create a VM in a zone that is not mapped in the selected storage profile, the operation will fail.

Default storage configuration

In addition to storage profiles for VM disks, you can configure which pools are used for backups, images, and ISOs under Platform > Default Storage. See Configure Default Storage for details.

The default storage settings The Default Storage page lets you select the Proxmox storage pool for each category.

Apply I/O limits

I/O limits cap the read and write throughput for VM disks assigned to a storage profile. Values are specified in MB/s.

Profile	Read Limit	Write Limit	Typical Use Case
Performance	500 MB/s	400 MB/s	Databases, high-throughput workloads
Standard	200 MB/s	150 MB/s	General-purpose VMs
Economy	50 MB/s	30 MB/s	Dev/test, archival workloads

I/O limits are applied at the Proxmox level as disk throttling parameters. This ensures that no single VM can saturate the storage backend, providing fair access across all VMs sharing the same pool.

When a VM has multiple disks from different storage profiles, each disk is throttled according to its own profile's limits. A VM can have a "Performance" boot disk and an "Economy" data disk.

Storage profiles work alongside compute profiles when creating VMs. Together, they define the complete resource allocation for a virtual machine: CPU, memory, disk location, and disk performance.

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Compute Profiles

Named vCPU and memory combinations that standardize VM sizing. Define profiles like Small, Medium, and Large to simplify provisioning, capacity planning, and billing.

Networking

Virtual networks backed by Proxmox Linux bridges, automatic IP assignment, edge gateways with firewall rules, and a WireGuard-based mesh overlay for secure inter-node communication.