Going back to windows 11 pro after 7 very good Proxmox years

[jorge.rutllant]

Dear all,

After about 7 years of using and enjoying Proxmox I reluctantly have decided to return to Windows 11 pro and Virtualbox. I know this is one of the most sacrilegious things to say in this community. I hope you take this post as encouragement to improve in what I consider a huge blind spot in Proxmox.

Let me explain, I am a retired IT manager from the Banking Industry and have a fair share of experience in what a “professional data center” should be. My hobby during the last years has been to play and build a decent home lab environment and for this Proxmox has been the anchor around my data center, it has been rock solid, incredible useful, very performant and simple to use. I think it is (by far) the best Hypervisor (paid or not).

Anybody with any experience in IT will know that one will not last for long without a clear and proven disaster recovery strategy. If things can fail they will and I got my share a couple of weeks ago when my main EXT4 nvme failed without any warning and got destroyed.

Over the years, to my surprise, searching in the Proxmox community forums (and of course googling all over the place) I find very little about this topic. I read things like “just use dd”, “just use ZFS”, “just reflash and redo your customizations”, “just backup /etc/” clearly a very amateurish approach to the problem. Anyway, searching and searching I arrived to a solution called “relax and recover” which is a Linux disaster recovery automation tool based in Bash. After weeks of reading and tweaking I got it working in Proxmox and tested it a couple of times, all fine.

But of course it failed when I needed it the most because of some incompatibilities in the updates Proxmox had done during these years, this is totally my fault for not being more careful reading lots and lots of logs, etc…

So, I was looking at doing more research on this problem and start from scratch or simply migrate all my VMs and spend around U$ 100 for a proven tool for backup/disaster recovery in windows that has worked flawlessly for me since, I think, windows XP (in my case AOMEI but there many others). It took me a couple of hours and now I am sure I have a disaster recovery strategy that will “just work”.

Well this is me saying good bye to this wonderful project and hoping not to regret too much (I know I will) for this very heretical move.

Sorry for the long post, Have fun and best regards,
Jorge.

 

[tcabernoch]

Win11 HyperV is an advanced product that you should check out.
Its getting better. Still got b0rked virtual sound tho. I just don't get that.

 

[Kingneutron]

If you're throwing over Proxmox for Windows 11 on bare metal, well sorrynotsorry - you're acting the fool. Win11 is nothing but spyware and less reliable than Linux. The amount of tweaking and turning things off that needs to be done to make it Just Fkn Work as an OS is nothing short of insane.

And with MS trying to move everything to Der Cloud and charge you a yearly (or monthly) fee just to have working software, yeah - good luck with that. Your desktop experience in 5 years may not be what you expect.

You should have done a bit more research

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9J-mmoCLTs

 

[dMopp]

Restic for proxmox itself and pbs for the VMs. I don’t know how you actually did a research but this is already enough?!

 

[ubu]

Don't forget to use crowdstrike to secure your windows experience

Sorry your post looks like clickbait, how in the world are you not able to recover your proxmox from your backups.

If you use REAR, restore PVE from REAR, restore VMs from pbs.

If REAR does not work:

Install proxmox, apply your config, attach your PBS server, restore your VMs.

 

[kellogs]

TLDR

 

[tcabernoch]

Come on now folks. OP has a point. Proxmox makes a terrible desktop OS.

I'm tellin ya bud. Win 11 HyperV is a new animal. Give it a shot. (Oh, and run Enterprise instead of Pro, for Pete's sake! Really!)

 

[guruevi]

So you had a drive failure, no RAID or backup and that is somehow Proxmox fault?

Sorry to say, but Windows/VirtualBox will bug out on a lot more, especially if you have a disk failure. For Proxmox all you have to do is reinstall Proxmox, then recover from any of the many backup solutions (you could’ve just rsync the data if your drive was still readable).

 

[INFOLOGEEK]

Hi,
At the moment I have installed proxmox with full kde as a desktop pc on this recent ThinkBook 14 G6 IRL model because my favorite file system is zfs.
For server:
It's possible to use zfs raid and backup vm with pbs or the windows integrated system (I created a python script to create 7-day backups with wbadmin).
You can save your config files with pbs, rsync or other.... PVE is always on dedicated raid disks as well as my vms. One case among others, I had a crash with pve and I reinstalled pve, it's fast, copied the vm config, imported the zfs zpool and all my vms is ok to start. You can have different scenarios but the proxmox environment offers interesting things in open-source!...

 

[frankmanzhu]

I agree that we all have some sort of pain with PBS especially with the host backup itself.
Thanks for the above mentioned "Restic" and "ReaR". If those things can be done inside PBS, then that will be great.

"Install proxmox, apply your config, attach your PBS server, restore your VMs." Sometimes won't work. Sometimes the old working running kernel isn't available. Nested virtualization with vmware workstation is still not really working on PVE8 and PVE7 is just out of supported life span.

IMHO, the ability to backup the host is equally as important as the ability to backup individual vms.

 

[ubu]

I agree that we all have some sort of pain with PBS especially with the host backup itself.
Thanks for the above mentioned "Restic" and "ReaR". If those things can be done inside PBS, then that will be great.

"Install proxmox, apply your config, attach your PBS server, restore your VMs." Sometimes won't work. Sometimes the old working running kernel isn't available. Nested virtualization with vmware workstation is still not really working on PVE8 and PVE7 is just out of supported life span.

IMHO, the ability to backup the host is equally as important as the ability to backup individual vms.

PVE host backup in PBS is in the works, afaik. ( I hope it is ready soon)

But the idea is there is not much important data on the PVE host itself, just network Config, storage config and so on.
If your PVE is part of a Proxmox cluster, you just remove it from th cluster, do a fresh pve reinstall and join the cluster again

 

[alexskysilk]

Anybody with any experience in IT will know that one will not last for long without a clear and proven disaster recovery strategy. If things can fail they will and I got my share a couple of weeks ago when my main EXT4 nvme failed without any warning and got destroyed.

I'm not sure what to say here. You knowingly operated in a manner opposite to your experience. Either you're excluding yourself from the group "Anybody with any experience in IT," or deliberately courting failure?

Over the years, to my surprise, searching in the Proxmox community forums (and of course googling all over the place) I find very little about this topic. I read things like “just use dd”, “just use ZFS”, “just reflash and redo your customizations”, “just backup /etc/”

the MEANS by which one can achieve recoverability are not the issue. Why did you not pursue ANY?

I reluctantly have decided to return to Windows 11 pro and Virtualbox

Windows 11 and Proxmox VE are not meant or designed to be replacements for each other. Windows is an endpoint OS. If you want/need a desktop. you should be comparing Windows and, as an example, Linux Mint. If you're looking for hypervisor solutions, windows server+hyperv. Windows solutions are more commercially friendly and have more options for commercially supported backup and DR solutions, but it still NEEDS something deployed and is subject to caveats and exceptions specific to what you deploy. Garbage in, garbage out.

Lastly, no one "with any experience in IT" would run a hypervisor on a Windows desktop client. its simply not suitable.

 

[zodiac]

Backing up the host to PBS is easy. Just write a cron job that takes a ZFS snapshot and uses the PBS client to send it to the backup server.

Restoring from PBS is moderately more difficult. Not a big deal, if you only need to restore a couple of files, but a bit more tedious if you need to restore a full system after replacing hardware. It's doable, but it currently requires some technical skills. It would be nice, if the Proxmox VE installation media came with a boot option to automatically restore from backup.

I use PBS for all my backup needs. It's great for containers and VMs, of course. But I also back up my various IOT devices, my Chrombook's Linux drive, and other non-Proxmox Linux devices. Came in handy the other day, when one of the Raspberry Pi's died. Restored from PBS to an SD card and I was back in business in no time.

 

[ubu]

I agree that we all have some sort of pain with PBS especially with the host backup itself.
Thanks for the above mentioned "Restic" and "ReaR". If those things can be done inside PBS, then that will be great.

"Install proxmox, apply your config, attach your PBS server, restore your VMs." Sometimes won't work. Sometimes the old working running kernel isn't available. Nested virtualization with vmware workstation is still not really working on PVE8 and PVE7 is just out of supported life span.

IMHO, the ability to backup the host is equally as important as the ability to backup individual vms.

If you run pve7 currently (even if it is out of service), you can still reinstall a new proxmox7 (even if not recommended)

 

[frankmanzhu]

If you run pve7 currently (even if it is out of service), you can still reinstall a new proxmox7 (even if not recommended)

Yeah, currently that's what I am doing.

PVE host backup in PBS is in the works, afaik. ( I hope it is ready soon)

But the idea is there is not much important data on the PVE host itself, just network Config, storage config and so on.
If your PVE is part of a Proxmox cluster, you just remove it from th cluster, do a fresh pve reinstall and join the cluster again

My use case is a little bit uncommon. My server setup is exactly like what you described and it is working 100% without much work. (without all complicated passthrough)

However, my desktop has more configurations, e.g. gpu, pcie, usb passthrough etc. This is actually where proxmox is far better than vmware. I'm used to vmware, so nested virtualization is important for me. I guess not many people use proxmox on the desktop with multiple screens, logitech flow setup.

I do like proxmox a lot so that I even install it for my desktop uses. Since pve8 kinda broke vmware nested virtualization and it's not that easy to rollback (without back up/restore the host feature), I guess I have to run on pve7 for a while without support. I like nested virtualization, I can install pve7 -> windows11 with vmware workstation -> pve8 -> windows 11 with vmware workstation -> a linux distro to test if nested virtualization works for pve8.

 

[ubu]

That sounds very interresting, have you documented your setup somewhere?

 

[frankmanzhu]

That sounds very interresting, have you documented your setup somewhere?

Sorry, it's not documented as it's very specific with the hardware. Every time I changed new motherboard, cpu etc. I need to re-do most of them and try out different parameters. My only suggestion is to get a motherboard with great IOMMU layout and VFIO support so you can split all devices easily to different vms.

 

[tcabernoch]

Oh are we gonna brag about our workstations now?
B650e Taichi Lite, Ryzen 9 7950 32 vcpu, 128gb ram, 4 nvme Highpoint PCIe RAID0, 15TB in various storage
It's got more raw number crunch than any of the servers I run professionally, and has more hosting capacity than most.

And it runs Win11 Hyper-V hosting a cluster of
3 PVE nested hosts of 8vcpu 24gb, and that cluster runs nested guests
Graphite and InfluxDB, connected to PVE Metric Server.
A complete lab.

And completely pointless. Like my life. Wasting away, talking to robots ...