Best practice for PVE and PBS hosting

V

Veidit

Member
Proxmox Subscriber
May 1, 2022
63
9
13
Stockholm, Sweden
Hi everyone, I hope you all are having a great day!

I have used PVE with community support and today I bought a PBS subscrition with basic support.
I am using Hostbill today for domain and DNS services and Hostbill supports both PVE and PBS and then authentication with the built Proxmox VE Authentication server (and the one used for PBS).
I'm now looking for tips around having a hosting service for PVE and PBS (For PBS you will pay for a minimum of 500GB and then per GB and month)
I will have a cluster of Epyc (gen 2) servers and Ceph and NFS storage.

Have a wonderful day!
P.S. I am planning to becom a Proxmox partner as well D.S.
 
Veidit said:
authentication with the built Proxmox VE Authentication server (and the one used for PBS).
Click to expand...
You mean the @pve realm?

Veidit said:
I'm now looking for tips around having a hosting service for PVE and PBS
Click to expand...
how are you planning to do the billing?


Have you checked what others have built in regard to this? I tried a few of them and they have all their own provisioning service. You wont want to have customers edit network settings like VLAN and such, therefore you need automation around it.
 
LnxBil said:
You mean the @pve realm?


how are you planning to do the billing?


Have you checked what others have built in regard to this? I tried a few of them and they have all their own provisioning service. You wont want to have customers edit network settings like VLAN and such, therefore you need automation around it.
Click to expand...
Yes @pve realm, sorry for not beeing clear there.


The plan is to use Hostbill for billing and provisioning: https://hostbillapp.com/feature/proxmox-overview/
I agree, you don't want them to change vlan, IP and so forth.
 
anyone here has tried running both PVE and PBS on the same physical box using LXC for PBS? I’m thinking about space-saving and simplicity, but worried about potential IO or performance issues. Has anyone compared that setup to using a dedicated host or a VM instead? Would love to hear real-world experiences.
 
Kavynglepner said:
anyone here has tried running both PVE and PBS on the same physical box using LXC for PBS? I’m thinking about space-saving and simplicity, but worried about potential IO or performance issues. Has anyone compared that setup to using a dedicated host or a VM instead? Would love to hear real-world experiences.
Click to expand...
On one Hetzner machine we have that for fast restore and replicate it then offsite every other hour.
 
  • Like
Reactions: FrankList80 and Johannes S
Kavynglepner said:
anyone here has tried running both PVE and PBS on the same physical box using LXC for PBS? I’m thinking about space-saving and simplicity, but worried about potential IO or performance issues. Has anyone compared that setup to using a dedicated host or a VM instead? Would love to hear real-world experiences.
Click to expand...

lxc isn't supported officially but works good enough for a lot of people. Still something you need to consider and I wouldn't do such a setup in a corporate environment. Might still be good enough for a homelab ;) I personally prefer (although not recommended either) to install a PBS as a VM since then you have an easy backup of your PBS host with Proxmox native backup function (as vzdump vma file) without the datastores but a working PBS configuration.

Supported but not recommended is installing PBS on the same host as ProxmoxVE: https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#install-proxmox-backup-server-on-proxmox-ve

In terms of performance and IO LXC or a direct host install propably doesn't make a lot of difference, a VM is propably different though.

The reason it's not recommended is the same reason why FrankList80 did his rant: In case of a failure of your PVE server your backups are lost too.
This can be mitigated though by having a second PBS (e.G. as a VM on a NAS) or an datastore outside of your server. This might be a network share (not great for performance, thus nothing for corporate environments, might still be enough for your homelab) or an external USB drive as "removable datastore". The external USB is the more budget friendly variant, the second PBS the more comfortable even if you don't want it to run the whole time (due to energy cost concerns you can automate wake-over-lan and shutdown after transfering the backups).

BTW: @PwrBank did a writeup how to use the LXC support in the last TrueNAS version to setup PBS as lxc on TrueNAS: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pbs-on-truenas-have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too.162860/

At the moment I have two PBS, one VM on the same Proxmox server as my TrueNAS VM and one on a netcup vserver for offsite backup. I'm now tempted to add a PBS LXC inside the TrueNAS VM to get rid of the network share I'm using at the moment as datastore for the PBS VM.
 
  • Like
Reactions: FrankList80 and UdoB
I now see that you want to offer hosting services. First I think that you should consider to contact Proxmox Server Solutions how to become a hosting partner (they might also have some insights on best practices). Second for strict isolation of your customers I would highly recommend to strictly seperate between their VMs and PBS storage. Depending on your local laws this might even be an compilance requirement (in case you need to ensure a strict seperation of data to legally host stuff for them).
 
  • Like
Reactions: Veidit and Kavynglepner
I actually didn’t want the hassle of managing everything on my own server. I switched to a secure Nextcloud hosting service and they handle the updates and backups, so I don’t have to mess with it. It's helped me keep farm records synced between my phone and laptop without worrying about losing anything.
 
Last edited:
Kavynglepner said:
I actually didn’t want the hassle of managing everything on my own server. I switched to a secure Nextcloud hosting service and they handle the updates and backups, so I don’t have to mess with it. It's helped me keep farm records synced between my phone and laptop without worrying about losing anything.
Click to expand...
Sorry I meant @Veidit because he wrote that he is planning to offer PVE and PBS hosting services. What I don't get: If you are now using Netcloud why are you even bothering with ProxmoxVE? Isn't it overkill then? Or are you using PVE for the stuff in your home network but use the Nextcloud as external data backup?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom