Can PBS act as SAN as well?

[DJFriar]

I have been tasked with building a production Proxmox system where the intention was to have two PVE servers in a cluster, plus one PBS system to provide storage and backup services (and to be a QDevice). When it was designed, the PBS is the sole storage system and therefore has all the large SSDs (five 7.68TB SSDs), and the two VM servers contain just a basic 400GB SSD each to house the PVE host OS.

The assumption was that PBS would be a large storage pool that would be used for both the VM storage for the two servers as well as the backups themselves (we will also copy the backups to a cloud provider to server as off-site backups).

PBS is installed on bare metal, but in researching how to configure this I'm beginning to question if this was correctly spec'd out. It seems like PBS solely handles backups and not the more SAN-like role we has intended as well. Is this accurate or am I just misreading the documentation?

 

[narrateourale]

The PBS is a backup target. It does not offer any other kind of storage functionality out of the box. But, it is based on Debian Linux. Therefore, no one is stopping you to set up a ZFS dataset and export it as NFS, or install iSCSI tools and configure it as a target for iSCSI over ZFS.

How much you get official support for such a setup is a different topic though. ;-)

 

[VictorSTS]

Bad design decision, as your cluster will be rendered useless when the PBS server breaks or is taken down for maintenance. Not to mention that you will be unable to restore your backups because both the cluster storage and the backups will be in the same machine.