I want to put PBS on a separate machine but it seems like such a waste of resources. Is it possible and advisable to create a 2nd Proxmox PVE install on another machine and install PBS virtualized on it and then use that 2nd machine to do VM/LXC & bare metal backups of the first Proxmox VE install and other computers on my network. I want this to be a backup server for my whole house.
Can PBS Virtualized on a second PVE install and work?
- Thread starter Jin35
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there's no generic answer to that 
PBS does a lot of random I/O (for backup and restore) and metadata R/W (GC) and a mix of both (verification). anything involving verifying data (backup, verify) can also be CPU intensive.
running it in a VM might affect I/O performance depending on your storage setup. running it next to an in-use PVE might mean that the two fight for resources.
PBS does a lot of random I/O (for backup and restore) and metadata R/W (GC) and a mix of both (verification). anything involving verifying data (backup, verify) can also be CPU intensive.running it in a VM might affect I/O performance depending on your storage setup. running it next to an in-use PVE might mean that the two fight for resources.
I am thinking of possibly using my second physical machine to run PBS and use my main machine to run PVE. I am planning to created a Duplicity/Duplicati/UrBackup server to backup my home mac and pc computers on my main machine. Then my PBS can backup all of the main machine including the backup data from my home computers. Does this make sense? I am not sure if PBS actually backups shared storage which I would use for my vm's and LXC's.... Am I understanding this correctly? For example. If I run Truenas in vm and connect a raid pool made on Proxmox VE to it... will that pool backed-up with PBS? What is the best setup for the scenarios I mentioned above. I am a newbie and need so much help. Thanks in advance.
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when backing up guests, PVE will include disks/mountpoints marked for backup in the guest config. it will also print what is included or not in the log. anything you mount inside the guest or behind PVE's back, PVE won't back up since it doesn't know about it.
with backups, it's always best to actually verify their contents (e.g., doing spot checks, but ideally, doing full restore tests every once in a while).
with backups, it's always best to actually verify their contents (e.g., doing spot checks, but ideally, doing full restore tests every once in a while).
It really depends on your usecase and which risks you are willing to take. For professional setups it's recommended to setup a dedicated local PBS onsite and offsite with enterprise SSDs in a RAID mirror (ZFS is great for it, but hardware RAID would work too of course). The benefit is that even if the actual PVE host gets broken you still have your VMS together with PBS on a system which doesn't need ProxmoxVE to run.
For a homelab this might be a little bit overkill though and depending of what you want to achieve it might still be a good setup to setup ProxmoxVE as VM. I remember a discussion in the German forum, where some professionals mentioned their setup for their customers offsite backups. They basically rent a dedicated server from some hoster with enterprise disks in them. Then they first install ProxmoxVE on it and afterwards PBS as a VM on it. The benefit is, that they now have an offsite PBS which sync the PBS backups from the customers main locations PBS to the dedicated server.
So their customers have now three copies of their VMs: One in production, one onsite and another one offsite in multiple snapshots so even if one copy is lost you can still go back to an older one. This is especially important in case of an Ransomware attach where the ransomware or hacker might have managed to take over the complete local infrastructure (which then needs to be remade completly) but not the offsite one which then yould be used as starting point for setting up everything again. The PBS manual has a chapter on ransomware protection with backups: https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/storage.html#ransomware-protection-recovery
The problem in running PBS as vm however is what do you do when the ProxmoxVE has some problems Then you first need to come back to a running PVE, then need to resetup PBS before starting the restore. On the other hand a PBS vm can easily backed up itself with ProxmoxVEs native vzdump function. So: Pick your poison
I personally do something mixed for my homelab: I have three mini-pcs. Two of them are my lab cluster. The third one is a standalone-install of ProxmoxVE (called naspve) containing a NAS VM and a PBS VM (which also act as a qdevice for the actual lab cluster). The VMs of my cluster are backed up at least daily to the PBS VM on naspve and then synced daily to a cheap netcup vserver (around 10 Euro per month) with a running PBS for offsite backup. Once a week the native vzdump function creates additional backups of the cluster vms and of the NAS and PBS vm. These would even work if I lost everything stored in the local and offsite PBS. The vzdumps are backuped on a cloud storage with restic. restic also takes care of my actual data (stuff stored on my notebook and in the NAS) since the cloud storage has more space than the vserver.
For my needs this is a good setup but it should also be noted that up to now I didn't had the time to do a complete manual restore test so take my words with a grain of salt.
Yyour usecase might be quite different though. Just one example: Since PBS now supports external datastores it might be more practical or cheaper for you to just backup everything in a local PBS (plus a vzdump backup of the PBS if it's in a VM) and sync it to an external USB drive once a week. If you have more than one external drive and remember to store one of them offsite (e.g. your office, a family member or friends place) and swap them on a regular schedule this might be a good solution for you which might be easier or cheaper to achieve. Again: Pick your poison
I have two Lenovo Thinkstation P520s I am using for my home servers.
I plan to use Srv #1 as my main server and Srv #2 as my backup server. I also have a NAS.
Srv #2 has the same processor with 32GB of Ram.
I am connecting Srv #1 and Srv #2 with a Mellanox X3 card using a DAC cable
and Srv #1 will have a copper 10G connection to the 10G switch.
I have 4x14TB HDDs and 5x6TB HDDs for storage. I will intal PVE on Srv #1 with Raid 1 (2 250G NVME SSDs). I will get a 4TB drive for video editing purposes on Srv #1.
I will install PVE on Srv #2 with a 1TB NVME SSD.
Here's my question.
I understand that I can set up a virtualized PBS on Srv #2 to backup Srv #1 (VMs/LXCs and their drive data?) effectively. I don't have that much hardware so this is appealing . In other words I want to turn Srv #2 into a general backup server. I will be editing video off of Srv #1 so I will have an SMB share on it [ possibly created in a Truenas VM with HBA passthrough].
In other words, can I do something like use #2 to run a virtualized PBS and a VM for Urbackup. Then the virtualized PBS will backup PVE on Srv #1 and Urbackup will backup my 2 Mac laptops and two windows computers. But I want to ensure the data in the SMB share holding video data is backed up as well. Can I use the Urbackup to backup the SMB share on PVE to Srv #2's drives? What's the best way to make sure everything is covered and I am using the hardware efficiently.
P.S. I actually have a cloud backup solution that backups up a NAS I have to the cloud.
I plan to use Srv #1 as my main server and Srv #2 as my backup server. I also have a NAS.
Srv #2 has the same processor with 32GB of Ram.
I am connecting Srv #1 and Srv #2 with a Mellanox X3 card using a DAC cable
and Srv #1 will have a copper 10G connection to the 10G switch.
I have 4x14TB HDDs and 5x6TB HDDs for storage. I will intal PVE on Srv #1 with Raid 1 (2 250G NVME SSDs). I will get a 4TB drive for video editing purposes on Srv #1.
I will install PVE on Srv #2 with a 1TB NVME SSD.
Here's my question.
I understand that I can set up a virtualized PBS on Srv #2 to backup Srv #1 (VMs/LXCs and their drive data?) effectively. I don't have that much hardware so this is appealing . In other words I want to turn Srv #2 into a general backup server. I will be editing video off of Srv #1 so I will have an SMB share on it [ possibly created in a Truenas VM with HBA passthrough].
In other words, can I do something like use #2 to run a virtualized PBS and a VM for Urbackup. Then the virtualized PBS will backup PVE on Srv #1 and Urbackup will backup my 2 Mac laptops and two windows computers. But I want to ensure the data in the SMB share holding video data is backed up as well. Can I use the Urbackup to backup the SMB share on PVE to Srv #2's drives? What's the best way to make sure everything is covered and I am using the hardware efficiently.
P.S. I actually have a cloud backup solution that backups up a NAS I have to the cloud.