Cold spare instance, how to?

[exp]

Hello,

I have been running a proxmox instance for a couple of months with local ZFS mirror and a few VMs and containers.

Since I have exactly the same hardware twice, I'd like to use one as a cold standby/spare instance. Ideally, I'd like to sync everything from the master to the spare every night but have the spare turned off otherwise.

I'd love to use cluster feature for it but I am not sure if this is the right approach since it was built for high availability.

What is the best way to achieve this?

 

[leesteken]

Maybe something like I suggested here? But maybe other people known of better ways for your use case.

 

[exp]

Thank you! So a cluster seems NOT to be the right option.

But uff, PBS, I checked the documentation, that gets crazy complicated. Even if I install both PBS server and client on the respective VE nodes directly it seems I still need to skip backups locally and they need to be on a different dataset (even zpool?) and duplicates everything.

(Offline) migration only works in a cluster?

Can I somehow manually transfer all VMs/CTs via zfs send/recv?

 

[leesteken]

Thank you! So a cluster seems NOT to be the right option.

Not unless you have a third node (or vote) and run all most of the time.

But uff, PBS, I checked the documentation, that gets crazy complicated. Even if I install both PBS server and client on the respective VE nodes directly it seems I still need to skip backups locally and they need to be on a different dataset (even zpool?) and duplicates everything.

Running PBS in a container (on both PVEs) provides backups as well as a way to quickly get a VM up and running on the other PVE.
Maybe it's not easy at first (although I think it is: install, add a datastore, add it to PVE) but you get a lot in return after the first one, as they can very quickly backup running VMs and sync between them.

(Offline) migration only works in a cluster?

According to the Proxmox roadmap you can migrate between separate PVE's using the command line since 7.3.

Can I somehow manually transfer all VMs/CTs via zfs send/recv?

Probably.