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Move Proxmox VMs & Containers to a New Storage Drive

Reasons you may need to move VM & container storage:​

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Upgrading to a larger/faster drive, running out of space, moving to SSD/NVMe for performance, replacing failing hardware, decommissioning drives, reconfiguring RAID/storage pools, consolidating storage, workload separation, improving HA/live migration with network/shared storage, preparing for maintenance/upgrades, optimizing backup or disaster recovery, balancing cluster node resources, capacity expansion, and more.

Moving Proxmox VM Storage​

  1. Prepare the VM:
  • Shut down the VM (optional but recommended).
  • Navigate: VM → Hardware → Hard Disk (e.g., scsi0).
  1. Initiate Move Storage:
  • Click the "Disk Action" dropdown → select "Move Storage".
Disk Action dropdown

  • In the popup, select:

    • Target Storage: choose your local storage (e.g., local, local-lvm).
Select Target Storage
  • Check Delete Source to remove original disk after migration.
  • Click "Move Disk".
  1. Monitor Progress:
  • Follow migration progress in Proxmox task log.
  • Verify in Hardware → Hard Disk that disk now points to local storage.
  • Remove any unused disk entries.
Migration progress Ceph pool disk remaining

Note: Ceph pool cannot be destroyed or modified until all VM/container disks are removed.

Moving Container Storage​

  • Turn off the container.
  • Go to Resources tab (not hardware tab).
  • Follow same move storage steps as for VMs.
Container Resources tab

Common Errors​

VM is locked (snapshot) (500)​

VM locked error

Step-by-step unlock in Proxmox shell (main node CLI)​

  1. Identify locked VM (note VMID):
qm list
  1. Unlock VM:
qm unlock <VMID>

Example:

qm unlock 100
  1. Verify unlock:
qm config <VMID>

No lock icon should appear next to VM name in UI.

Unable to delete snapshot volume (500)​

  • Make sure VM is off.
  • Unlock VM if locked:
qm unlock <VMID>
  • Force delete orphaned snapshot:
qm delsnapshot <VMID> <snapshot-name> --force

Replace <snapshot-name> with actual snapshot name (e.g., BeforeDiskUpgrade).

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