Disaster Recovery Edition proposal

[David Peterson]

Guys,

I would like to propose a feature that you might already be pondering. While you can add machines to put up clusters, this ends up costing money and not all of my clients are willing to buy 3 machines when they only need a couple of VM's to start. I can easily propose a NAS and a VM or a storage drive if the budget is tight.

My proposal is this. If you have a main drive failure and you have made sure your primary storage is either on a NAS or a secondary drive, then a Live CD should be able to get the OS operational for short term and connect to any storage supported by Proxmox. This would require a USB drive or other external storage for settings and a live CD edition, but would be very helpful in the event of a drive failure when you only have one Proxmox server.

Thoughts, criticisms and outright flames are welcome.

 

[tom]

I am not sure what you suggest. As long as you have a valid backup you can restore fast.

If you lost the main OS due to a harddrive failure, you can install in about 5 minutes again after you replaced the disk, just using our ISO installer.

 

[David Peterson]

So if I had VM's on the secondary drive the system would be able to re-add all of the VM's once it's installed or would it require additional work? I am nowhere near an expert on all of this so I apologize if I am sounding newbish.

 

[e100]

So if I had VM's on the secondary drive the system would be able to re-add all of the VM's once it's installed or would it require additional work? I am nowhere near an expert on all of this so I apologize if I am sounding newbish.

Welcome fellow Ohioan!
Oh wait, I recognise your name too, you graduate from HHS?

Always perform full backups that are stored offsite to protect from things like lightening, floods, asteroids, theft etc.

For quick recovery:
If you have the Proxmox OS on one disk and the VM data on another disk or NAS and you want to quickly recover from the OS disk failing there are a couple items you need to address BEFORE the failure.
#1 Ensure the disks/system storing the VM data is reliable/stable, ie mirrored disks at a minimum.
#2 Make sure you copy the VM config files from the OS disk onto some other storage that is also reliable, the same storage as the VM data would be a good choice if possible.

To recover from the Proxmox OS disk failure:
1. Install new disk
2. Install Proxmox onto new disk
3. Reconnect the VM storage
4. Configure the storage in proxmox with the same names as before (noting this config data would be a good idea BEFORE the failure)
5. Restore the VM config files into the proper place in /etc/pve
6. Start your VMs