Moving existing PBS from VMWare workstation to PVE cluster

fsckedagain

New Member
May 20, 2026
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Is this a decent idea or no? And if it's ok, how do I go about doing this task?

I only had it on VMWare because I have a lot of storage on this PC, but now I am using s3 storage and don't need all the local space. I would like to have it in my proxmox pve cluster if that's not terribly dangerous.

It is only home lab stuff, so not the end of the world if I lose it. It would just take time to rebuild it all.

TIA!!!
 
There is a risk that PBS may become unavailable if the PVE cluster becomes corrupted, but the migration is possible.

Since VMware Workstation VMs can be exported as OVF, one option is to import them into PVE as OVF files.

Another possible approach is to deploy a new PBS instance on PVE and then use the remote synchronization feature to copy the datastore.

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migrate_to_Proxmox_VE#Import_OVF
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/managing-remotes.html#syncjobs
Thanks! I will check those out once I figure out how to get openwrt or opnsense to play nice with multiple vlans and access points and interfaces oh my LOL
 
Imho it's a bad idea to have your backups inside your prouction environment. Imagine something bad happens ( hardware error, ransomware) you will need your cluster to restore your cluster. Even worse: If some bad actor manages to take over your cluster he can also access your backups.

So I wouldn't do this without some mitigations, some ideas:
- Keep your vmware pbs to have another local copy ( also good for fast restores)
- Use the PBS vm/lxc only as relay to be able to do fast backup / restore without needing acess to the vmware pbs or s3 storage. That way your pc doesn't need to run all the time
- Configure the permissions that each PBS can read/pull backups of each other nut not write/remove/modify them.
- D'ont use your PBS vm/lxc inside the cluster for the s3 aceess so a bad actor doesn't get it's acess infos (user, password, api tokens). Instead use your vware pbs for pushing to s3.
- Alternatively get a cheap cloud vserver, install PBS on it and use this PBS for pulling backups from your cluster pbs/vm andpushing them to S3.
- You could even create firewall rules which would allow access to the offsite or vmware pbs only from your pc (since for a pull sync no open incoming port is needed on the pulling pbs).

You should also have muliple copies. More on this and the whole permission business can be found in the manual:
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/storage.html#ransomware-protection-recovery

Finally: Don't forget to test restores from time to time.
Update: It might make sense to have some automatism/script for the power up pc/start vmware pbs/sync backups dance, so you don't need it running the whole time but can't forget it.
 
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