BACKUP VM BEST PRACTICE ??

[MEYNIER]

HI everyone
I am currently working on deploying a Proxmox Server that need to manage around 30 clients.
Each client got their own virtual bridge for segregation and got 1 Pfsense VM and 1 or more Windows server VM.
The VM are stock in ZFS pool (raidz2 of 8x6TB HD)
I got also another FREENAS SERVER with zpool (raidz2 of 8x8Tb HD)?

Currently i got only 6 Clients .

My question concerns the backup of the windows server

Currently i deploy :
- pve-zsync with sync every 15 minutes and 5 max sanpshot in order to solve the case of proxmox major issue .
- Proxmox backup using NFS share on FREENAS server that handle backup every night

The pve-zsync works gret but the issue i got is that the proxmox backup.

Indeed the job begin at 22h00 and finish at 07h00 currently and i fear that in few months it will take too long to be inside the night shift and will impact my clients.

What is the best practice concerning VM backup ?

I looked around in the web but didn't find so many clear information.

KR

 

[LnxBil]

What is the best practice concerning VM backup ?

If the backups takes too much time, you only have a few options:
- get better hardware
- reduce the volume of the backup
- abandon the use vzdump files and only rely on ZFS replication

 

[MEYNIER]

Ok thanks it was my guess but prefer to ask in case i miss something

Have a good day

 

[LnxBil]

There are other options, but they need even more hardware:
Spread the load over different nodes in a cluster, so that you can backup in parallel (backup on a node is always sequential). With compression enabled your NFS can store the backup of multiple nodes at the same time. We can store multiple hundreds of MB/sec raw input over a 1 GBE connection to our NFS server. More than 3 TB of raw data is backupped in a few hours wall time.

 

[guletz]

Hi,

A simple trick - before start a backup for a VM, you could run inside a VM something as:

ls -alR /

and then start your backup. In this case the metadata will be in RAM/zfs-cache. So your backup will be finish in a shorter time(reading from RAM is faster then read from disks). This is more eficient if the VM have many many files.

Good luck / Bafta

 

[MEYNIER]

Thanks for all these info
I will think about and come back with the result

 

[Haider Jarral]

What did you find MEYNIER ?