Backups: ZSTD on Proxmox or TrueNAS?

[rmweiss]

Hi.

I'm currently doing some tests with Proxmox and TrueNAS (both on dedicated machines connected via 10gbit) and looking at the Proxmox backup function got me thinking:

Would it make any sense to send uncompressed Backups to a TrueNAS volume with ZSTD compression (instead of doing the ZSTD compression in Proxmox)?

Like I said: I'm using a 10gbit connection, so network speed should not be a limiting factor.

Thanks.

 

[Dunuin]

If you care about speed and capacity I would run a proxmox backup server (PBS) in a TrueNAS VM and that is always doing ZSTD conpression. As only PBS is capable of doing incremental backups. And it also saves a ton of capacity because of deduplication.

I wasn't able to install PBS from the PBS ISO in a TrueNAS Core VM, but installing PBS ontop of a Debian 11 VM worked fine:
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#install-proxmox-backup-server-on-debian

 

[LnxBil]

Would it make any sense to send uncompressed Backups to a TrueNAS volume with ZSTD compression (instead of doing the ZSTD compression in Proxmox)?

In addition to @Dunuin's answer now more to the question itself:

Backup compression on PVE is only single threaded because of the piping, but on the storage end (e.g. ZFS with ZSTD) uses parallel compression which is therefore fast IFF you network is not the bottleneck.

 

[rmweiss]

@Dunuin:
I looked briefly at PBS and I like the idea of incremental backups.

The problem is that I currently plan to use large hard drives instead of fast SSDs for the backup storage, which seems to be far from ideal for PBS.

If in the future I decide to add an SSD pool to the storage, then I will surely take another look at PBS.

@LnxBil:
Wouldn't adding something like "zstd: 4" to /etc/vzdump.conf make the compression on PVE also multithreaded?

 

[Dunuin]

@Dunuin:
I looked briefly at PBS and I like the idea of incremental backups.

The problem is that I currently plan to use large hard drives instead of fast SSDs for the backup storage, which seems to be far from ideal for PBS.

If in the future I decide to add an SSD pool to the storage, then I will surely take another look at PBS.

Might still be faster, even when using HDDs. Lets say you got a 1TB virtual disk that only changed 10GB since the last backup. Vzdump would need to backup the whole 1TB. PBS would just need to backup 10GB. So even if PBS would be 50 times slower because of a IOPS bottleneck, it still would be double as fast.
So better give it a try and compare it against vzdump.

 

[LnxBil]

Wouldn't adding something like "zstd: 4" to /etc/vzdump.conf make the compression on PVE also multithreaded?

Yes, but you would normally have more available resources on the backupserver than on the PVE side - at least we do. on ZFS, ALL CPUs are used to compress and normally they are not doing any virtualization work, so you have more power available, but your mileage way vary.

Lets say you got a 1TB virtual disk that only changed 10GB since the last backup. Vzdump would need to backup the whole 1TB. PBS would just need to backup 10GB. So even if PBS would be 50 times slower because of a IOPS bottleneck, it still would be double as fast.
So better give it a try and compare it against vzdump.

Yes! If you want to have a optimized storage system on ZFS bases with deduplicated data (without using ZFS deduplication), you have a look at my talk from ProxTalks 2017.