2.3+ snapshot - LVM required?

[shubes]

I haven't been able to determine exactly what's required in order to do a snapshot backup in PVE2.3+. The wiki says "The new KVM live backup is targeted to work for all storage types and eliminates the need for special LVM configurations with enough snapshot space by avoiding the use of temporary storage." Does this mean that LVM is no longer required for doing snapshots?

I'm hoping to do a backup of a VM with raw disk, to an NFS share. Is this possible now? If not, what is required for doing snapshots?

Thanks to everyone for their great work.

 

[mmenaz]

Yes, KVM machines are snapshotted for backup using an internal mechanism, so don't require underlying storage support.
Your case (NFS with a file in .raw format, but could be whatever format) is one that perfectly show the usefulness of this important improvement

 

[shubes]

Yes, KVM machines are snapshotted for backup using an internal mechanism, so don't require underlying storage support.
Your case (NFS with a file in .raw format, but could be whatever format) is one that perfectly show the usefulness of this important improvement

Is there any information about how this mechanism works? Overlay filesystem perhaps?

I'm wondering about a specific configuration that I've created. I have a VM which provides NFS shares to other (local) VMs for storing user data. This data is stored on 2nd and 3rd drives which are accessed directly by the VM (software raid-1 arrray which the VM controls, in case you're wondering). To do this, I manually created the additional VM drives with "qm set NNN -virtioN /dev/disk/by-id/XXXXXX" statements (no gui for this, yet). If you think of a virtualized NAS/SAN, you get the picture.

I'm considering creating an NFS store using this VM for holding backups of VMs as well, which I expect will work nicely. My question is, what about backing up this VM to itself? The NFS store would be on the user data drives which are separate and would not be backed up, so I expect there would not be a problem of recursion. I'm interesting in capturing a backup of only the VM itself, without the user data stored on the additional drives.

Does anyone have any insight regarding a problem with this configuration? I realize that restoring will be a little tricky, but I'm willing to live with that.

Thanks for any insights.

 

[mmenaz]

Don't have details about the new backup mechanism, I remember some discussion in the kvm/qemu dev mailing list when Proxmox team tried to introduce upstream the new backup format, seems unsuccessfully.
About backup, I've not carefully read your setup, but if you do Vm backups inside a VM, you are going to hurt yourself (what about WHEN proxmox HD will break?).
Do a favour yourself, buy a simple 2TB HD, add it to your proxmox server as backup storage and do vm backups there.

 

[shubes]

Don't have details about the new backup mechanism, I remember some discussion in the kvm/qemu dev mailing list when Proxmox team tried to introduce upstream the new backup format, seems unsuccessfully.
About backup, I've not carefully read your setup, but if you do Vm backups inside a VM, you are going to hurt yourself (what about WHEN proxmox HD will break?).
Do a favour yourself, buy a simple 2TB HD, add it to your proxmox server as backup storage and do vm backups there.

I'm afraid you don't understand my setup. I am backing up to a separate raid1 array, controlled by a VM. PVE is on a separate raid1 array. In the event of failure, the backup (and user data) drives are accessible individually by any host, apart from PVE. FWIW, I don't really consider them to be backups unless/until they're off site.

Thanks.

 

[cesarpk]

I'm afraid you don't understand my setup. I am backing up to a separate raid1 array, controlled by a VM. PVE is on a separate raid1 array. In the event of failure, the backup (and user data) drives are accessible individually by any host, apart from PVE. FWIW, I don't really consider them to be backups unless/until they're off site.

Thanks.

Without understand your needs, i believe that the best idea will be have two RAIDs 1, the first will have PVE, and the second must be mount it into "PVE" and share it by "NFS".

But if you explain that you want to do, maybe we can guide you better.

Best regards
Cesar