Adding NFS Share as Datastore in Proxmox Backup Server

[plastilin]

I'm currently using a OviOS Linux as my main NFS storage and PBS as virtual machine. I'd like to continue to use network storage as my backup target. How would add my NFS share to the Proxmox Backup Server as storage?

 

[oguz]

hi,

you can simply mount your NFS share (with mount command or by adding to /etc/fstab). afterwards create a datastore on the mountpoint (via GUI, or with proxmox-backup-manager datastore create mystore /path/to/my/nfs)

 

[littlesatno]

hi,

you can simply mount your NFS share (with mount command or by adding to /etc/fstab). afterwards create a datastore on the mountpoint (via GUI, or with proxmox-backup-manager datastore create mystore /path/to/my/nfs)

that worked fine for me.
But why does proxmox (backup server) backups free (unused) space from disks?

 

[Jackobli]

that worked fine for me.
But why does proxmox (backup server) backups free (unused) space from disks?

Why are you thinking, that PBS backups «free» space?
Use the function «mail» in the settings to send a report to yourself, there you find useful infos about the backup process itself. Like how long it did run and also about which disk/dirty bitmaps did get backup up. The status page of the vm shows alway the whole size of the VM itself, but only changed blocks were transferred to your nfs-share.

 

[NinthWave]

For me, it is not working because the directory and share are made by user=root while the datastore creation is made by user "backup"

root@pbs:/mnt# proxmox-backup-manager datastore create store_core /mnt/store_core
TASK ERROR: EPERM: Operation not permitted
Error: task failed (status EPERM: Operation not permitted)

And NFS does not allow to mouns using uid and gid

So I don't know how to proceed

 

[Dunuin]

The backup user needs write access. Did you try to chown the folder on your NAS to the UID of the backup user and/or map the NFS share to the backup users UID?

 

[Nanobug]

hi,

you can simply mount your NFS share (with mount command or by adding to /etc/fstab). afterwards create a datastore on the mountpoint (via GUI, or with proxmox-backup-manager datastore create mystore /path/to/my/nfs)

Just wanted to let you know this worked.
I used SMB in my setup, but this worked otherwise. Thank you

 

[nmincone]

Good to know you got it working. I wrote a step by step on setting up NFS for PBS backups (I used a NFS v4 share on my Synology NAS) that I could share. I'm sure it can be applied for any NFS share...

 

[tcabernoch]

People work so hard on making this bad idea function.
And it is a bad idea, from the start. Known quantity. It will work poorly at very best.

For homelab or technology demos, learning stuff, poking around, I get it.
I like to string together silly components that shouldn't be used. It's fun to watch the systems struggle. Groovy.

But if you are doing this for work, reconsider your path.
Do not store your .chunks folder directly on NFS or SMB mounts in the PBS filesystem.

 

[ScottZ.]

Please provide the officially supported way to store the .chunks file on shared storage then. Companies have shared storage, included dedicated ones for backup. Where is the documentation on the supported / unsupported methods since NFS/SMB direct access isn't supported (according to?)

 

[tcabernoch]

I've seen Promox staff provide the directions to mount and use NFS has a PBS datastore. I think its supported? Maybe? That's unclear to me.

But is it a good idea? No. It is not. I've seen some extensive testing and done plenty of my own.
I can state that NFS and SMB mounts in the PBS filesystem are an exponentially worse way to store your .chunks than anything else.

iSCSI tested pretty well, and may be an option in many cases.

If you actually want to know about this, I can dig up @Der Harry 's thread.

 

[Johannes S]

The documentations recommended hardware list enterprise SSDs, so no, using NFS or CIFS is not really supported:
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#recommended-server-system-requirements
Since the system is basically a debian one can of course use the usual way to mount shared network storage or iSCSI.
Whether it's a good idea is a different thing though, I agress with tcabernoch on this: PBS stores its data in a lot of small files which will be needed to be read when doing the verify and garbage collection jobs. A network storage will always be slower than a local storage. If you must, iSCSI will propably work better than NFS/CIFS though.
It might be an alternative to add a shared storage via FC but I can't recall any discussions on it.

 

[mhert]

I've added an nfs share as sync target (so no direct backup). It's running well so far. Garbage Collection is slow of course.

Just mount the share via fstab und go with it...

 

[mhert]

Configuration of the sync job looks like this:

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/push-sync-job-from-pbs-to-nas-nfs.156464/