Netapp as PBS-Storage

[OsvaldoP]

After an successfull migration from esxi to pve, one of our customer have an free netap and want to use them as pbs backupstorage
Currently active is an phy PBS with local SSD. Plan is, to use the netapp as second storage to hold multiple backups. Sync from local storage to netapp.

The following options should be available for connecting the NetApp:
NFS/SMB: I think this is the traditional approach that is often described, but not
optimal.

iSCSI: I can't say much about this.

S3: We already using S3, and it runs smoothly for VMs with several hundred GBs.

Which approach would you consider the best from a technical standpoint?
I think S3 would be attractive, we don't have ZFS on the NetApp, and PBS and NetApp would be separated.

Both systems are connected via 10 GbE.

kr
Roland

 

[robertlukan]

After an successfull migration from esxi to pve, one of our customer have an free netap and want to use them as pbs backupstorage
Currently active is an phy PBS with local SSD. Plan is, to use the netapp as second storage to hold multiple backups. Sync from local storage to netapp.

The following options should be available for connecting the NetApp:
NFS/SMB: I think this is the traditional approach that is often described, but not
optimal.

iSCSI: I can't say much about this.

S3: We already using S3, and it runs smoothly for VMs with several hundred GBs.

Which approach would you consider the best from a technical standpoint?
I think S3 would be attractive, we don't have ZFS on the NetApp, and PBS and NetApp would be separated.

Both systems are connected via 10 GbE.

kr
Roland

I have used NetApp as iSCSI storage for PBS in the past. It worked, but I was using an older NetApp where I had to use multiple LUNs and overlay them with ZFS to get a decent datastore for PBS. Frankly speaking I would not do that anymore as it is quite complicated, iSCSI, with multi pathing, ZFS on top.

I think S3 would be better option, I am not sure how is the performance.

I have not tried NFS, but I am not sure if that would even work properly as you have another layer of file system in between.

 

[OsvaldoP]

Hi,

I'm not a NetApp expert, so I want to keep the project straightforward, no ZFS on NetApp, no iSCSI, and so on.
I also agree that an NFS share is not best practice for PBS usage. Therefore, my idea is to use S3 storage.

Our customer is currently in communication with their NetApp expert. If possible, they will set up S3 storage, and we will connect PBS to it.

I will report on our experience.

 

[Johannes S]

The main drawback I see with using the NetApp filer as datastore are two things:
- The performance especially with operations needing high IOPS like verify or garbage collection. It let's worse with HDDs instead of SSDs. What storage are you planning to use?
- The larger attack surface since a bad actor getting access to the NetApp can alter/remove etc your customers backups. This is especially problematic with NFS if you don't use KerberosAuth but also true for S3 ( but to be fair less likely). How are you planning to do the offsite backup? A remote PBS can be configured to not be reachable from your local PBS but still be able to pull backups from the local one. But if you happen to use a cloud S3 ( e.g. aws, wasabi or hetzner) datastore on your local PBS a bad actor taking over the PBS can also alter the NetApps backups AND your offsite backup on some cloud s3 storage.

Regarding performance benchmarking NFS versus S3 with different storage media ( hdd/ssd) might give some ideas what do expect.