# What are volumes? How do I use them?

Volumes are virtual block devices exported from a central storage backend to
virtual machines. A volume can be attached to one virtual machine at a time.
These volumes can be further used to provide different storage options, such as
NFS through a virtual machine running an [NFS server](../../cloud/pouta/tutorials/nfs-server.md).

To know how to use volumes on Pouta, see
[Persistent volumes](../../cloud/pouta/persistent-volumes.md).
