XCP-ng connect USB disk for VM storage

28th January 2026

This describes connects a disk for XCP to store virtual disks. (This will format your disk)
NOT the other way, which is connecting a raw USB disk to 1 Virtual Machine. (no format, Windows can read the existing data if it’s NTFS/FAT formatted)

list USB devices:
lsblk | grep -A 3 NAME
or just
lsblk

i used the disk size to verify which disk. look for something like sda or sdb

Mount the disk. don’t expect it to auto-remount when unplugged and re-plugged.
xe sr-create name-label=”USB-8Tb” shared=false device-config:device=/dev/sdb type=lvm content-type=user

In the XOA Web Gui
New, Storage
Host = wherever the drive is physically connected
Name = whatever
Description = whatever
Storage Type = ext (local) this supports THIN provisioning