Proxmox & Ceph in a Home Lab: Building a Cluster from a Single Drive & Surviving the CLI Battle

Building a Ceph cluster on Proxmox VE in a home lab is a fantastic proving ground. The catch is that Ceph is inherently a powerful Enterprise-grade system – and by default, it demands entire, raw physical drives (raw block devices) for its OSD (Object Storage Daemon) daemons. But what if your "IT Bunker" only has one physical server with a single extra 111 GB SSD, and you want to simulate a full-fledged 3-node cluster? My architecture looked like this: admin (Physical Proxmox host) admin-02 (Nested VM on the main server) admin-03 (VM... running remotely on a separate desktop PC) Here is the story of how I "cheated" Ceph's strict mechanics, sliced a single drive into pieces, bypassed hypervisor GUI errors, and ultimately achieved the coveted HEALTH_OK status. Challenge 1: Handing an LVM Partition over to Ceph My plan was to split the physical sdc (111.8 GB) drive on the main server into three 35 GB logical volumes using LVM (Logical Volume Manager) . Here is the lsblk output from the ma