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Introduction

Today I updated Firemox, my TUI for PVE with SolidFire.

Firemox is developed and tested with:

  • Proxmox 9.1.1
  • SolidFire 12.5
  • PowerShell 7.6.2 on Linux

Allow Snapshots as Volume-Chain: on by default

That's new in PVE 9 and while it could be manually enabled after LVM creation, it's nicer to have it on by default because it's been stable enough in SANmox.

Allow Snapshots as Volume-Chain

Other changes

Some other, minor changes:

  • Too many parameters were hard-coded. Now most of them can be passed on startup, including the option to ignore TLS validation (sigh…)
  • Firemox now uses PVE secret token, no more PVE passwords. It's annoying having to create these, but it's more secure, so it's better that way.
  • Firemox now injects PVE metadata into SolidFire volume attributes once PVE datastore is created on shared LVM, so if you use SFC or something else that gets those, you can filter those out/in, or aggregate all PVE volumes

I still do not do what I do in SANmox - allow profile creation. Although those SANmox profile credentials are encrypted, I still don't like the idea, so that hasn't been added. I also did not want to mess with automated iSCSI configuration. I know it's "nice to have" these features, but I also know it's risky if you have any other iSCSI clients. That's why neither of these features made it to Firemox - I like them, but not enough to add them here.

Conclusion

Firemox has the same value proposition as before: consistent, end-to-end management for SolidFire in PVE environments.

  • Create volumes on SolidFire for PVE users
  • Create VG and shared LVM on Proxmox VE
  • Maintain consistent naming and avoid mess
    • SolidFire Volume: dc1-dc2-001
    • PVE iSCSI pool: dc1-dc2-001
    • PVE VG: vg-dc1-dc2-001
    • PVE LVM: lvm-dc1-dc2-001

Shared LVM for Proxmox

Firemox is fast, has a minimal attack surface, requires almost no updates and removes the need to use a Web browser where malicious browser extensions can get you.

The UI hasn't changed - this is one of the sub-menus - it works the same, but with fewer bugs.

Firemox TUI

PVE's storage view from iSCSI pool to VG to LVM:

Firemox naming

An update, released as v1.0.0 (as I may update it again), has been posted to the repo.

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