Partitioning and Install on 3 NVMe disks

[Vael_S]

@Erica.vH

@Vael_S

You can have 1 password and 50 LUKS drives if you want.
You don’t have to use LVM at all.
I have 65 guests on my PC at the moment.
Bu having normal partitioning I do keep my guests backed up regularly so I won’t ever lose everything.

Hello,
Thank you for your message.
wow, that’s a lot of user management
I have … well, myself to manage, and that’s already a lot for me :-p

Not a lot of user management at al, I’m the only user.
Anyone I invite to assist with coding just log in to the guest by SSH.

@Erica.vH

@Vael_S

I even have a backup clone of my drive every week along side the daily backups of my work machines.

I’m only running a 500 GB drive at the moment though unfortunately.
I don’t use EFI either, I stick to standard.

Right. I opted for the Qube internal BU because I’ve been lead towards it, but I’m open to any other solution, I have a dedicated 6TB disk only for that purpose (saving my Qubes, leaving the root to reinstall)

I feel that having images is actually more beneficial, because I can assign the ones I want to be thick assignment to be think and have all sectors assigned, rathe than being LVM and always being thin.
If I use my normal backup method, copying off the guests, I can jsut restore them myself whenever I want, and if there are issues with the images I can recover the data.
If there is an issue with the backup drive and I lose one sector of the backup image, I can’t get anything back.
And whenver I back up or restore, I use “qemu-img convert” to do so, this means that the backed up images ae cleaner than what may be on my machine.
but I do clean up my drives images every now and again too though. Means I keep the space more available, and the images stay cleaner and faster.

I can get you my backup script if you would like, and I can send it to you via private message.
If you want any specific functionality in the backup script let me know, I keep advancing it all the time with things that I want to get done. Recently I removed about 50% of the code as it had things that were just way over the top.

@Erica.vH

@Vael_S

I have reinstalled this machine about 40 times recently after doing stupid things with Qubes tryign to update it and the qubes updates breakign the isntallation.

as I have my guests on a separate drive, all I do is reinstall qubes on another drive, then go to my alternate 500 GB paired drive, create the guests on there, then copy across the images, and done, I’m up and running within 2 hours.

If I had NVME drives instead of slow SATA I’d have then set up as mirrored.

I would tell you to go normal partioning instead of LVM.

keep the boot and root system on one drive. Don’t really worry about a USB unless you need it for booting security.

And then you would have the boot, efi and root filesystem on that USB.

What I would like is for the laptop (bought specifically for Qube, P15 maxed to 128GB RAM, 3 screens) to boot-up to Win10 (because Catia) when USB key not inserted, boot-up to Qube when USB key inserted
USB key with /boot and /boot/efi and some smaller partition for encryption keys

@Vael_S

I would tell you just set up the 2TB as mirrored. Faster reads.
But since it’s NVME, depending on the generation and drive speeds you may not need to.

Mirroring the 2x 2TB (1800GB) would prevent me from adding qubes, and would makes the BU more tricky, no ?

Mirroring doesn’t affect anything like that.
Just means if one SSD dies, you can plug in another one, then the good one mirrors to the new one, and you actually only have te downtime of the copying of the drive from one to the other on boot.

Mirroring may mean slower write speeds, but not by much at all, maybe 1%, but read speeds are doubled in some cases.

For further information…

RAID level 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 | Advantage, disadvantage, use

Having WinBlows boot up locally like that would just void the point of having Qubes for security reasons.
It can be done, but I would not recommend it.

If you wan tto have that work,
install Windows to the 512 MB drive.

In BIOS, make sure to turn off the other drives COMPLETELY when you want to boot to WinBlows.
When booting to Qubes, you should do viseversa and turn off the Windows drive port.

Personally, I have one set of drives for Qubes, and one set for WinBlows.
I change them out every time I want to switch between them.

@Erica.vH

@Vael_S

They can just be configured as a JBOD in the BIOS, then in Qubes installation, set up the JBOD as one partition mounted at “/var/lib/qubes”
for the 512 set it up as /boot 512M , EFI 1GB, / (remainder) You can always set up as / (64GB), /home (remainder)
if you want the home directory to be separate.
Do the same thing on the usb is you want to use the usb instead.

As for the backups, I have backups, and I don’t use the qubes built-in backup system, I just copy off my image files.

I rarely take a backup of my qubes (os) drive because I jsut run the installer as I think it’s faster (since I have SATA). You can have multiple pools for the systems as well. You could set one up for /var/lib/qubes and one for /qubesvms/ and have guests set up in both. there isn’t any real restriction on it.

I’m mentioning /home as if the place in Qube for the qubes, but if they are in a different place, then I don’t need /home, I just go with the limited names I know
As for JBOD or pools and such, I would rather keep it simple, no mirroring, and for /var/lib/qubes, should I understand that qubes (not the templates, the actual running qubes) are created there ? so I would need a /var of at least (640+128+128+128+512) = 1,5TB, meaning the entire NVMe#2 for /var; while the NVMe#1 would have root and a partition for the templates ?

/var/lib/qubes (ref as root) contains all your qubes.
contains…
/vm-templates (templates directory)
/appvms (your normal use guests)
/servicevms (Where your net vms and all are stored)
/backups (Where it stores all your changes to the XML file.)
/updates (I think the qubes (Dom0) updates?)
/vm-kernels (The kernels that are available to use for the virtuals in PV/PVM mode)

@Erica.vH

@Vael_S

I have a full qubes install on one of my USBs that I can run properly, not very fast, but allows me to do most things when on the run, as long as it’s on USB3, since it is slow. But without running guests, if it’s just the operating system, it runs fast enough on USB 3 with the guests on the local drive(s).

So there are many ways to do things, it’s all a matter of how you want to work it.

I don’t use LUKS because I run SATA, and since I generally have 20-30 guests running at most times, the SATA gets a bit hot and heavy.
With your NVME, you should be fine to have it with LUKS.

But if using LUKS, make sure you back up enoguh, as if it doesn’t encrypt properly and the power goes out before writing finishes, you lose it all…

I’m considering LUKS because it’s standard in Qube install, and I want to make full use (and learn) at this point, I don’t really need full encryption, but I don’t want to have to do it later, so I’ll stick to it for now

LUKS isn’t the standard in the Qubes Install that I know of. Only in 3.2 did I find that LUKS was the default for install. And that was only in one variant.
Might be different in the latest itteration of the ISO thoguh, I don’t know, I will have to look at that.

@Erica.vH

@Vael_S

I can help with a lot regarding installation and setup if you need further assistance.

That’s very kind, TY, and knowing that I’ve had this laptop since late 2021 only for Qube but never really came around to install it, I’m so discouraged that I’m really open to any help !
To be fair, I’ve had great help from @51lieal who did a nice script (formatting, creating subs, creating partition with each its own encryption, etc…) but never got it to work by myself (The bug between the keyboard and the chair)

Sumup:
Boot with usb key. No key = boot local, key-in = boot Qube, with encryption key
NVMe#1 = 1 partition root, 1 partition X, 1 partition Y,
NVMe#2 = 1 partition for each qubes (/var ?)
Preferably with same LUKS for all

Make sure the 2TB Mirror is done in the BIOS. Should not be a software mirror.

USB
/boot (512MB) No LUKS here
/ ( > 24 GB) Optional encryption. I would advise against it for the USB.

NVME 2TB Mirror
/var/lib/qubes (Fill) If you want LUKS, go for it.

Just use the partition manager to greate the partitions and make it work.
That is how you really should set up the layout.
Just have the virtuals on the 2TB.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions, don’t be aftraid to ask.