I need snapshots in order to switch to Proxmox

[jslanier]

Hey folks,
I have been using Proxmox now since version 5, and I absolutely love it. I work in higher ed and our University has a huge contract with VMWare, but unfortunately the prices are going up quickly. We have a Dell SC5020 SAN that we use for VMWare, and I have configured our dev Proxmox 7 cluster to use some iscsi volumes from the SAN as well via MPIO/lvm. The only problem with this is that I cannot take snapshots. Snapshots are extremely important to our organization, and they have saved us multiple times after failed upgrades and/or server changes. When we buy new hosts, we will be buying them with nvme SSDs to use Ceph on the new cluster, but we will likely need to use the existing SAN as well. How can we get snapshots if VM disks are on the LVMs from the SAN? Or is there a better way for us to configure the iscsi SAN storage for Proxmox to allow for snapshots?

Thanks

 

[Dunuin]

Maybe incremental PBS backups could be an alternative?

 

[bbgeek17]

The limiting factor in your configuration is LVM rather than backend SAN. If you would like to utilize some snapshot functionality with existing SAN you may want to look at qcow image storage and qcow based snapshots.

With our SAN we implemented a volume per-disk provisioning and hence are able to wire in backend snapshot functionality which is much faster than filesystem based one.

 

[jslanier]

The limiting factor in your configuration is LVM rather than backend SAN. If you would like to utilize some snapshot functionality with existing SAN you may want to look at qcow image storage and qcow based snapshots.

With our SAN we implemented a volume per-disk provisioning and hence are able to wire in backend snapshot functionality which is much faster than filesystem based one.

This sounds promising. Can you explain your configuration further? Can I do MPIO plus qcow?

 

[bbgeek17]

Yes, of course, MPIO is independent of the upper level filesystem format - thats how you connect raw devices to your hosts.

However you may lose share'ability of the storage. You will need to place a filesystem on top of your MPIO disk and define it following this guide: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage:_Directory, unless you can create a central storage/NFS/CIFS. Neither option is ideal.

As for our configuration/capabilities, they are best described here https://kb.blockbridge.com/guide/proxmox/

 

[jslanier]

Yes, of course, MPIO is independent of the upper level filesystem format - thats how you connect raw devices to your hosts.

However you may lose share'ability of the storage. You will need to place a filesystem on top of your MPIO disk and define it following this guide: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage:_Directory, unless you can create a central storage/NFS/CIFS. Neither option is ideal.

As for our configuration/capabilities, they are best described here https://kb.blockbridge.com/guide/proxmox/

Blockbridge looks great, but I do not see support for Proxmox 7 in there yet. I will keep checking for added support.

 

[bbgeek17]

Thanks for the reminder! We just havent updated the KB, PVE7 is supported.