Backup vs. Snapshot

ejc317

Member
Oct 18, 2012
263
0
16
I just want to better understand the backup capabilities of Proxmox as I couldn't get a clear picture.

1) What is a Snapshot vs. Backup (seems that on a VM level, once there are snapshots, you can't backup) - I assume snapshot is a bunch of basic system settings but it assumes the VM is running. In a catastraophic failure, we'll need a backup not a snapshot?

2) What is the backup on the system level?

3) Is there a system level snapshot? We have a SAN and we can do a volume group snapshot - should we just use that? If so what feature does that overlap with on the proxmox side

4) With regards to restoring backups, our plan is this

We have 4 nodes with 64GB SSD local drives and a 2TB SSD SAN (with 16 GBPS NICs - we'll be adding 10GBPS soon). We also have a backup server with 3TB storage running SATA (but only has 2 nics so its slow)

We want to store ISOs on the backup server, KVM templates on the backup server and everything else on the iSCSI SAN. We will add more local storage such that we can backup to local server then send it over to the backup server.

a) We can DRBD the local storage but any real benefits? These local drives really just to backup the VMs on that node

b) We will have KVM templates on the backup server such that when we create a new VM we'll just clone one of those and copy it over (but the issue is the storage for the VMs NEED to be an iSCSI volume so we'll have to create an iSCSI one and then copy files over - still don't know how to do this)

c) If we have KVM templates on local storage with DRBD that would make it easier ... but can get costly as we expand?
 

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