Live Restore

[dthompson]

I have a question about the live restore from a PBS to Node.
Say I have a server that dies and I need to restore it, so I pull from the previous nights backup.
This is a VM and not a container.
I have a VM Guest setup as the following:
1.) Boot disk: 32GB
2.) Data Disk: 3 x 1.0TB with LVM.

When I restore the disk, I can't seem to restore it live. In my testing it never works and the VM never comes online while its restoring. This is with the latest version of PBS as well.

Is this better handled if I just make the server as follows:
1.) Boot disk: 32GB
2.) Data Disk: 1 x 3.0TB ext4

I'm open to any insight here to help me figure out my goal for an effective restoration process to being the machines up quickly and continue to allow services to work.
Thanks

 

[dcsapak]

When I restore the disk, I can't seem to restore it live. In my testing it never works and the VM never comes online while its restoring. This is with the latest version of PBS as well.

what exactly do you mean by that? does the live restore task fail? if yes, what is the error?

 

[dthompson]

Sorry, yes I guess it was pretty vague.

The process doesn't fail, no error codes, but it never starts up the server either. Maybe its a data amount that needs to be restored.

So for instance, if I restore a small VM, say a web server. 1 disk (ext4), 20GB, that will start the restore process, kick into gear and then start to run as it should.

If I try and restore a mail server, with 1 disk for the boot and then other 3 disks in this case configured as an LVM, it never actually starts up properly. I can see the restore start, its continues, but the actual initiation of the VM doesn't every start. The console screen for the VM will blink, but never get to the post where it actually starts.

I thought maybe it was the fact that my data portion was on an LVM and the server needs to restore way more of the data structure before it can actually kick in as opposed to a single disk.

Hopefully that makes more sense to you?

This is all running off of the latest PVE servers under version 6. I plan on upgrading to version 7 shortly, but PBS is at the latest version.

 

[dcsapak]

ok that depends largely on how your guest is configured. if it needs data from large parts of the disk to boot properly then yes, live restore will take much longer

 

[dthompson]

I think its more of the fact that it has to rebuild a large LVM volume, so its sits and hangs until enough gets restored, which in this case could be a fw hours.

I'm going to switch it over to a large single VM disk, unless anyone thinks thats a bad idea for the data storage and then test again.
My guess is that the boot drive is looking for the disk in its fstab and the fact that its not available causes it to hang and not boot.