Good way to backup from several PVE clusters to one PBS (I hope)

[ednt]

I thought this would be interresting for others too:

If you want to use a central PBS for more then one cluster, you run into the problem of double IDs.

Ok, you can use different datastores, but then you have to know the expected sizes.

We did an other aproach:
We build one big datastore and afterwards we add datastores via absolute backing path which are below the big datastore.

Datastore data-1 (the main ZFS datastore) is located in:

/mnt/datastore/data-1

So I added a datastore user-1 with the path:

/mnt/datastore/data-1/user-1

user-1@pbs has backup permission to this datastore


I added a datastore user-2 with the path:

/mnt/datastore/data-1/user-2

user-2@pbs has backup permission to this datastore

No one has permission to the main datastore data-1


Now we can use user-1@pbs and datastore user-1 in cluster 1
and user-2@pbs and datastore user-2 in cluster 2

The storage is for all, and there can be no conflicts of IDs.

Maybe someone find this usefull.

 

[dylanw]

I know you're not actually asking a question, but I'm curious about the setup. Isn't this functionally equivalent to setting up two different datastores, but just with a third unnecessary datastore beneath them? If they're still sharing the one volume, it doesn't seem to fix the issue of having to know the expect sizes in advance.
Also note that although I can't find the post, I have a faint recollection that somebody had an issue in the past because of nesting datastores. However, I can't remember the context of the question, so the issue could be totally irrelevant here.

 

[oversite]

I know you're not actually asking a question, but I'm curious about the setup. Isn't this functionally equivalent to setting up two different datastores, but just with a third unnecessary datastore beneath them? If they're still sharing the one volume, it doesn't seem to fix the issue of having to know the expect sizes in advance.
Also note that although I can't find the post, I have a faint recollection that somebody had an issue in the past because of nesting datastores. However, I can't remember the context of the question, so the issue could be totally irrelevant here.

It might be this one where the root disk got filled because the logging got confused of nested datastores
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/root-disk-filling-up.84215/#post-370415

 

[prox_user]

Kind a help here!!
I'm truly needing some advice regarding proxmox. How can I take a piece a free space in a proxmox server and share it with other hosts as a backup storage???
Thanks in advance.

 

[Klug]

Ok, you can use different datastores, but then you have to know the expected sizes.

I don't get why, I might be missing something.

You create a pool, then you create datasets inside the pool (one per datastore) and you map each datastore to one dataset.
You don't have to know the size, thanks to the datasets.

 

[ednt]

You create a pool, then you create datasets inside the pool (one per datastore) and you map each datastore to one dataset.
You don't have to know the size, thanks to the datasets.

That was the idea, like in TrueNAS.
But it is not possible via the WEB GUI.

Also I did not found the corresponding zfs cmd.
(Personally I don't like zfs)

 

[Klug]

If your initial zpool is called "myPool" then this should work and you want to create two datasets named "repo_one" and "repo_two" then this should work:

#zfs create myPool/repo_one
#zfs create myPool/repo_two

Ultra quick reference: https://www.unixarena.com/2012/07/zfs-quick-command-reference-with.html/

 

[ednt]

But from the directory structure it is then still 'nested'.
Or I have to remove the parent datastore from the PBS.

I have to check if this is possible without loosing the datasets below.

 

[Klug]

They're nested if you have a parent repository that points to the zpool.

I don't think repo and dataset are tightened together (ie: if you remove a repo, it won't touch the dataset/pool), because the repo can be something else than a ZFS pool/dataset (NFS mount, local LVM or USB disk).