Are nfs/cifs datastores a planned feature in the future?

[C.G.B. Spender]

I've found some hacky approaches on the forum how to get a nfs/cifs shares working as pbs datastore, but I was wondering if this is at some point planned to be an official feature ? I don't mind waiting, just wondering if I should go ahead with the hacky methods if it's not being considered.

Thanks.

 

[Robstarusa]

I'd like to know this as well. I have manually put mounts in fstab & then pointed to those...but an official solution would be cleaner

 

[tom]

Proxmox Backup Server is designed to use high performance local storage.

You can configure nfs for cifs mounts manually but this is not recommended and you will see major performance drops.

 

[Robstarusa]

Proxmox Backup Server is designed to use high performance local storage.

You can configure nfs for cifs mounts manually but this is not recommended and you will see major performance drops.

Is it possible to qualify major?

Am I better off having 20 3TB sas 7200 spindles over 10Gbit/s CIFS or like 2 sata 8TB drives locally in raid1? My backups in general run decently. Prunes & enumerating 4000+ backups in the webui take quite a while though.

 

[Dunuin]

You shoudn't use HDDs at all because of the bad IOPS. PBS is designed to use SSDs because it needs to handle millions of small files.

But yes, if you don't need good performance a NFS share will work fine. And its just one fstab line you need to add, so its not really that hacky.

 

[Robstarusa]

You shoudn't use HDDs at all because of the bad IOPS. PBS is designed to use SSDs because it needs to handle millions of small files.

But yes, if you don't need good performance a NFS share will work fine. And its just one fstab line you need to add, so its not really that hacky.

16TB of ssd storage isn't exactly affordable/cheap....

 

[tom]

16TB of ssd storage isn't exactly affordable/cheap....

No one said that SSDs are cheap.

You will benefit a lot from deduplication and fast operations by using SSDs.

Based on your IP, you are located in US so if you consider TCO and the average cost of your hourly work rates, the costs of the SSD are really low compared to the costs of the admin working hours in case of backup/restore operations.

If you choose reliable datacenter SSDs (around 200 per TB), you have a very reliable backup server for many years.

 

[Robstarusa]

No one said that SSDs are cheap.

You will benefit a lot from deduplication and fast operations by using SSDs.

Based on your IP, you are located in US so if you consider TCO and the average cost of your hourly work rates, the costs of the SSD are really low compared to the costs of the admin working hours in case of backup/restore operations.

If you choose reliable datacenter SSDs (around 200 per TB), you have a very reliable backup server for many years.

With my current vm load, backups typically take an hour (for all vms) and restores dont' take that long either. The only thing that takes a long time is really pruning & verifying. At this point I think I'm going to just leave it as is.

There is no "TCO" or "hourly work rate" as I just run this at home on my own time. If a verify takes 22 hours....so it does. I'm not going to sit & watch it.

Just so you understand a bit more:

My worfklow is:

Nightly diff - CIFS/10Gbit -> Freenas -> Upload encrypted to cloud.

Even if I had ssds, if something catastrophic happened, it would take days to download it from the cloud.

 

[Dunuin]

16TB of ssd storage isn't exactly affordable/cheap....

Yes, but still the only option if you need alot of IOPS. Remember that everything will be splitted and stored as small chucks that are somewhere between some KB to max 4MB. So filling up a 8 TB datastore results in atleast 2 million files. And these 2+ million files will be deduplicated. so they get fragmented over time resulting in reads/writes that get more random than sequential. And a GC will then open every of the 2 million files and check its metadata...and you know how slow HDDs are at accessing millions of small files...

If using ZFS atleast using a SSD as special device storing the metadata may help to speed up the GC.

 

[Robstarusa]

I do think we flew a little off topic here.

I still think it would be nice to have a cifs/nfs option, esp since there are all ssd sans/nas available. Even iscsi or FC or something would be nice.

 

[tom]

I still think it would be nice to have a cifs/nfs option

You can configure this via CLI quite easy, but we do not recommend something which is not recommended (so no GUI planned).