Migrating Servers/Fresh Installs - Sanity Check

[aeisan]

Hello,

My current setup includes a primary storage server and a backup storage target, each running TrueNAS bare metal. On each TrueNAS server I am running a PBS VM. My typical backup scheme is the PVE nodes backup to the primary server PBS and less frequently the backup storage PBS runs a sync pull job from the primary. It's pretty simple and while not fully a 3-2-1 strategy, it works well enough for my home lab needs (I suppose it's important to point out this is a home lab).

Recently I have been mulling over the idea of (potentially) simplifying my server infrastructure. My thought was to move away from TrueNAS altogether and run PVE on the primary storage server and PBS on the backup storage server. I have a ~24TB ZFS pool on the primary storage server I intend to export from TrueNAS and import to PVE; I do not intent to wipe this pool and rebuild a pool to move data back onto.

The backup server currently has its datastore on an NFS share from the TrueNAS host. It's a little unorthodox but it works. I would probably do fresh install of PBS, wipe the disks and create a new datastore. I would then run a sync job to copy all the existing backups from the primary PBS to the new PBS server. Then I should be able to destroy the (old) primary PBS VM, go about installing PVE on the primary storage server, import the zpool, and all should be good.

I just have a couple questions, mostly to ask if the gurus think this is either a sound approach or if seems foolish.

1. Would you recommend putting PBS back on the primary storage server as a VM as I had before? I know running PBS in a VM is generally not recommended, but in a home lab environment I have been running it this way for a while with little issues. The idea here is to have just one more backup copy available, albeit local to the primary storage machine it is backing up. Or is that just dumb?

2. Does the transfer strategy detailed above seem sound? I'd like to keep the ~1 month of backups I have, but it is also not a deal breaker to wipe them and start new with backups.

Thanks all!

 

[Mike_Scholes]

Suppose it would work but if you lose the primary server you then lose your backup server if it's a vm. Just more hassle recovering as you would have to install a backup server somewhere in order for you to access your backups. Personally my home lab has a dedicated PVE, a dedicated PBS with it's own local storage, both NUCs, and then in addition a second synced copy of my backups to a USB drive and a third to S3. I'm always hacking and it's come in useful to have multiple copies. One good thing about having PBS as a VM is you can run snapshots before you attempt upgrades. My first PBS upgrade from 8-9 broke so I had to fully reinstall PBS, luckily I has the USB drive to get my backups back to the backup server. Starting to sound complicated now.

 

[aeisan]

Suppose it would work but if you lose the primary server you then lose your backup server if it's a vm. Just more hassle recovering as you would have to install a backup server somewhere in order for you to access your backups. Personally my home lab has a dedicated PVE, a dedicated PBS with it's own local storage, both NUCs, and then in addition a second synced copy of my backups to a USB drive and a third to S3. I'm always hacking and it's come in useful to have multiple copies. One good thing about having PBS as a VM is you can run snapshots before you attempt upgrades. My first PBS upgrade from 8-9 broke so I had to fully reinstall PBS, luckily I has the USB drive to get my backups back to the backup server. Starting to sound complicated now.

Thanks for the feedback Mike!

To be clear... After all the migrating I will end up with one bare-metal, dedicated PBS machine locally (the machine which was previously refereed to the the backup storage server). If I run a VM with PBS on the primary storage server (which is going to run PVE as the host/hypervisor) it would be for extra backup redundancy. You are totally correct that if the PVE node goes down I'd also lose that VM and its backups, but those will not be the sole source of PVE backups, just "extra" copies.

I do intend to look into better offsite and/or cold storage options as well. I tried using an external USB HDD to send back ups to as cold storage, but I found the process of mounting/unmounting the datastore to cause some issues with PBS. It's entirely possible that this was due to running PBS in a VM; I intend to explore this more once I have PBS running bare-metal. S3 is also something I may look into.