Most people install Proxmox VE directly on a local disk. The Proxmox VE installation CD offers several options for local disk management, and the current default setup uses LVM. The installer let you select a single disk for such setup, and uses that disk as physical volume for the Volume Group (VG) pve. The following output is from a test installation using a small 8GB disk:

# pvs
  PV         VG   Fmt  Attr PSize PFree
  /dev/sda3  pve  lvm2 a--  7.87g 876.00m

# vgs
  VG   #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize VFree
  pve    1   3   0 wz--n- 7.87g 876.00m

The installer allocates three Logical Volumes (LV) inside this VG:

# lvs
  LV   VG   Attr       LSize   Pool Origin Data%  Meta%
  data pve  twi-a-tz--   4.38g             0.00   0.63
  root pve  -wi-ao----   1.75g
  swap pve  -wi-ao---- 896.00m
root

Formatted as ext4, and contains the operation system.

swap

Swap partition

data

This volume uses LVM-thin, and is used to store VM images. LVM-thin is preferable for this task, because it offers efficient support for snapshots and clones.

Hardware

We highly recommend to use a hardware RAID controller (with BBU) for such setups. This increases performance, provides redundancy, and make disk replacements easier (hot-pluggable).

LVM itself does not need any special hardware, and memory requirements are very low.

Bootloader

We install two boot loaders by default. The first partition contains the standard GRUB boot loader. The second partition is an EFI System Partition (ESP), which makes it possible to boot on EFI systems.