Backup Server as a VM??

spetrillo

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Feb 15, 2024
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Hello all,

Can the Proxmox backup server run as a vm on a PVE or is that not a good solution?

Thanks,
Steve
 
The defintion of "good" depends of the point of view.

PBS in a VM is not recommended. https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#system-requirements does not mention virtualization at all.

I do run PBS in a VM with storage over NFS - and it does work for me. The main problem is to supply that VM with a Datastore which is fast enough; the recommendation calls for direct attached SSDs, not for virtual disks or network filesystems.

So my recommendation is: give it a try. But be aware of possible problems like slow backups and especially slow verify. These problems will increase with the amount of data stored in PBS. It might work first and fail on the long run! Once I was at a point where my installed rotating rust was simply too slow to list the backups in the Web Gui...

Good luck!
 
If you do run it as a vm, I would also recommend that it be in a different cluster than what it backs up, or at least the majority of the vms it backs up. If you have a cluster wide issue, you don't want your backup server down.
 
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I missed to mention that my described PBS is a VM - but in another system, not in the PVE cluster ;-)