backup opnsense vm not possible?

[Elleni]

I tried to backup our opnsense vm that is on a remote proxmox. Unfortunatelly it does not work. Is this not possible due to missing qemu-guest agent? So is qemu-guest-agent mandatory? There is an error happening during freeze at the beginning of the backup job.

 

[UdoB]

You do not route traffic from the opnsense Host to the backup server through that opnsense instance, do you?

That's what I tried (with a virtual router using Shorewall and an NFS backup datastore) - and failed

Best regards

 

[Elleni]

I do

Could it work if I create a dummy vm, and modify the dummy vm.conf to contain the opnsense vm disk and backup the dummy vm to pbs or is this a bad idea?

 

[UdoB]

Could it work if I create a dummy vm,

I have no idea.

But I did not mention my surprising solution workaround: I simply switched from an NFS Datastore to a CIFS Datastore on the same Datastore-Host (a Synology Diskstation).

Best regards

 

[H4R0]

no problems here backing up opnsense to nfs

just make sure qemu-guest-agent is disabled in vm options

 

[UdoB]

just make sure qemu-guest-agent is disabled in vm options

Oh! That's an interesting hint - I would have never tried this.

Thank you

 

[Elleni]

I do

Could it work if I create a dummy vm, and modify the dummy vm.conf to contain the opnsense vm disk and backup the dummy vm to pbs or is this a bad idea?

I tested that and it technically works, but I would like to know if I could run into problems with this. I am wondering as the same disk is running, while the dummy vm is backed up shutdown. Is my understanding correct that the disk is shortly freezed thus the backup should be consistent and not corrupt? Could there still be a problem with this setup or is it ok to do so?

 

[fabian]

I tested that and it technically works, but I would like to know if I could run into problems with this. I am wondering as the same disk is running, while the dummy vm is backed up shutdown. Is my understanding correct that the disk is shortly freezed thus the backup should be consistent and not corrupt? Could there still be a problem with this setup or is it ok to do so?

not a good idea. if a VM is running and has access to a disk, Qemu thinks it's the only one that has access. having another VM process access it in parallel can corrupt the volume.

 

[Elleni]

ok, thanks for confirmation. I will check if I can backup the opnsense and a second vm providing vpn connection to local ressources by installing pbs on the remote site and creating a local pbs instance on the remote site. If that works without interrupting services, I then could sync to local pbs. Could this work better? On both mentioned remote vms I suffer from timeouts while freezing the vms at the beginning of their backup jobs.