As someone who’s spent plenty of time building and maintaining Proxmox clusters, I’ve seen firsthand how critical storage architecture is to the stability and performance of any virtualized environment. Proxmox VE is a fantastic platform—lightweight, flexible, and great for both VMs and containers—but like most setups, it really comes down to how you handle storage.
That’s where Lightbits enters the conversation. If you’re running Proxmox in a production environment (or even a serious home lab), Lightbits provides a modern, high-performance software-defined storage backend that solves a bunch of common problems without introducing a lot of complexity.
NVMe/TCP That Doesn’t Suck
Let’s start with the basics. Lightbits is an NVMe/TCP solution, which means it delivers NVMe-class performance over plain old Ethernet. No RDMA, no exotic networking gear. Just standard TCP/IP.
You get:
- High throughput
- Sub-millisecond latency
- Multi-queue I/O support
- Full NVMe semantics
All over your existing network stack.
For Proxmox users who want shared storage but don’t want to build and babysit Ceph storage clusters, this is a killer option.
Shared Storage Without the Headaches
Most Proxmox clusters eventually run into the shared storage question. If you’re not using local disks with replication or ZFS-over-iSCSI hacks, you need something smarter. Ceph is powerful, but it’s also complex, especially if your environment isn’t massive. NFS is easy but slow and not particularly reliable.
Lightbits gives you a shared, resilient block storage pool with:
- Thin provisioning
- Inline compression
- Snapshots and clones
- Erasure coding or replica-based HA
And it does this with a clean API, a simple deployment model, and serious performance. You can carve out virtual disks for VMs or containers and attach them via virtio-scsi-single — no weird driver requirements or vendor lock-in.
Proxmox + Lightbits: Real Benefits
Here’s what I like most from a technical operator’s perspective:
🔹 Performance Without Tuning Hell
Lightbits gives you millions of IOPS and consistent latency, and you don’t have to spend hours tuning buffer sizes or wrestling with Ceph’s CRUSH maps.
🔹 Simpler HA
Built-in high availability at the storage layer means you don’t have to worry about onboard NVMe failures ruining your night or weekend.
🔹 Works with the Proxmox Way of Doing Things
Once connected you can manage Lightbits volumes like any other storage target. Whether you’re building VMs from templates, snapshotting workloads, or live-migrating VMs between nodes, everything “just works.”
🔹 Efficient Use of Hardware
You can deploy Lightbits on commodity servers with QLC NVMe SSDs and get enterprise-grade storage features. Combine that with inline compression and you’re squeezing way more out of your hardware budget.
Kubernetes? No Problem.
If you’re running K3s or full-blown Kubernetes clusters inside Proxmox (and let’s be real—many of us are), Lightbits has a rock-solid CSI driver. You get dynamic provisioning, persistent volumes, and snapshot support. You can even run Lightbits as a Cinder backend if you’re messing around with OpenStack inside your lab or environment.
Final Thoughts
If your current Proxmox storage setup involves local disks, NFS, or basic iSCSI and you’re running into performance or scaling limitations, Lightbits is a legit upgrade. It hits that sweet spot of being fast, resilient, and easy to manage, without requiring a full-time storage admin or a specialized SAN.
Proxmox gives you flexible compute, and Lightbits gives you flexible, high-performance storage. Put them together and you’ve got a rock-solid, scalable virtualization platform that punches way above its weight.
