[SOLVED] Newbie question: storage, partitions, and backups

[Jas]

Ok,

I am progressing with proxmox and I really like some of the parts of it. I have googled and searched for a simple introduction to how to partition a local disk for proxmox. (I could be doing this all wrong.)

Basically I would like to be able to take snapshots and backups of my openvz containers. (Ideally I would set them up to some baseline point and then start experimenting on top of them.) I have found the vzdump and vzrestore commands, so I can issue commands like:

mkdir /usr/mybackups
vzdump 105 -dumpdir /usr/mybackups

then later

vzrestore /usr/mybackups/vzdump-openvz-105-2013_10_12-16_26_25.tar 155

Then I can experiment with these containers, move them around etc. In fact I can use this to simply transfer openvz containers around (without setting up a cluster which I looked at but will leave to a bit later when I am more proficient with everything else.)

But I can't seem to do this through the web interface. The storage element is empty. I went so far as to install gparted on a thumb drive, booted from that, then crunched down the main lvm2 partition by 10G, created another ext3 partition of 10G, and rebooted proxmox. But now how do I set new small 10G partition as local storage in proxmox? Do I need to manually somehow set up the fstab file so that it sees this other local partition?

I see a lot of people asking questions about this but I wonder if these are recent and up to date, and also if there is now a better way. In any case I can take snapshots of KVM VM's but I can't do this for openVZ VM's from the interface. Why is this? I can do it from the command line but that isn't as nice. Is that what I should be doing?

Can anyone point out the correct article or forum post or help me?

Thanks,
Jason

 

[Jas]

Bump! Anyone?

 

[wahmed]

If i understand right, you want to setup One node Proxmox to test on and gain experience? And you are trying to setup a local storage to backup and restore from through Web GUI?
The setup is simple really. You already created a folder in /usr/mybackups.
So just goto Proxmox Web GUI > Datacenter > then click on Storage Tab > Click Add > Select Directory > Enter /usr/mybackups in Direcrtory and whatever name you want to give in ID box > Select Backups in Content > Change Max Backups to whatever number you want > Click Add.
This should be it. You might have to change some access rights for your mybackups folder, not sure but overall this is the procedure to use local storage.

 

[Jas]

Ohhh wow. That is so simple in the end! Thank you so much!! Was that written some where in some document somewhere? It would be nice to read the section but that answered my question!

 

[wahmed]

To be honest i do not even remember where i learned it from. May be from a wiki or may be right here. But i am glad it worked out for you.

I do know i heavily used it when trying to test out CEPH FileSystem. Mounting local directory for CEPH FS is the only way to use that filesystem.

 

[tom]

e.g. http://youtu.be/kHyf_l1Q1ow