Ok, I have some VM's created

[pfiltz]

I've played with Proxmox in the past.

I understand the role of VM's per se' Bear with me for a minute.

OK, I have some WIN10 VM's, 2003 Server VM's with apps on them, and configured for our network. Data storage will be used and saved on our Server for backup purposes.
Everything is great. Now all of a sudden the hard drive or some other component on the system is Ka-put. Now what?

Is there a way to "export" a VM to a USB drive so in the event we have a catastrophe system wise, I can just load up Proxmox on another Box, and import my VM's from that export?

I'm running the 6.4-4 environment for just learning purposes right now.
I'm just a newb in the VM world, but I do like Proxmox as my platform for VM's.

 

[oguz]

hi,

Everything is great. Now all of a sudden the hard drive or some other component on the system is Ka-put. Now what?

Is there a way to "export" a VM to a USB drive so in the event we have a catastrophe system wise, I can just load up Proxmox on another Box, and import my VM's from that export?

yes, you can take a backup of your VM [0]. then you can transfer the backup archive to another storage (usb, network drive, etc.) of your choosing. when you restore it on a different PVE environment it should work as normal (of course the configuration needs to be valid for that new host).

[0]: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapter_vzdump

 

[pfiltz]

Hello OG
I added "storage" in the datacenter view on my proxmox. I created a shared folder for testing purposes on my local PC. I created storage in the datacenter view, and applied all the required info. My shared folder on my PC shows up now as part of the storage. When I created it, I added it as CIFS.
What puzzles me now, is when I go to any VM that I've created, and click on backup, my "shared" folder from my PC doesn't show up as a place to store a backup to.
Did I miss a step? It still want's to store the backup to "local"

Thoughts?

TIA

 

[Dunuin]

Hello OG
I added "storage" in the datacenter view on my proxmox. I created a shared folder for testing purposes on my local PC. I created storage in the datacenter view, and applied all the required info. My shared folder on my PC shows up now as part of the storage. When I created it, I added it as CIFS.
What puzzles me now, is when I go to any VM that I've created, and click on backup, my "shared" folder from my PC doesn't show up as a place to store a backup to.
Did I miss a step? It still want's to store the backup to "local"

Thoughts?

TIA

You need to set the correct "content type" for that storage. If you want to store backups on it you need to select "Vzdump" as one of the content types.

 

[oguz]

Hello OG
I added "storage" in the datacenter view on my proxmox. I created a shared folder for testing purposes on my local PC. I created storage in the datacenter view, and applied all the required info. My shared folder on my PC shows up now as part of the storage. When I created it, I added it as CIFS.
What puzzles me now, is when I go to any VM that I've created, and click on backup, my "shared" folder from my PC doesn't show up as a place to store a backup to.
Did I miss a step? It still want's to store the backup to "local"

Thoughts?

TIA

have you enabled backup content for that storage? try checking the options in Datacenter > Storage > yourstorage > Edit > Content > VZDump backup file

 

[pfiltz]

Oh! I wasn't aware obviously that the location of the backup, dictated what type to be used. Most of this is over my head. I don't really have an real world application for a proxmox server, but I like the concept of VM's. Thanks

 

[oguz]

Oh! I wasn't aware obviously that the location of the backup, dictated what type to be used. Most of this is over my head. I don't really have an real world application for a proxmox server, but I like the concept of VM's. Thanks

no worries, that's why we have the forum for asking questions

you can also refer to our documentation, most things are explained quite detailed there [0]

[0]: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_introduction

 

[pfiltz]

Wow... It worked.... I haven't tested it yet, going backwards to restore, but at least it didn't crap out on me. Thanks. I'll browse over that link you provided as well.

 

[Dunuin]

Most of this is over my head. I don't really have an real world application for a proxmox server, but I like the concept of VM's. Thanks

Take a look at this list of software that you could selfhost on your PVE server: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
I always find new software I want to selfhost so I'm running out of ressources and need to upgrade my existing servers or even buy additional servers. But be aware, selfhosting can be addictive. Started with a Single core, 512MB, RAM Raspi1B and 16GB SD card and now I got 3 servers with 32 cores, 112GB RAM, 20 SSDs, 10 HDDs and I'm still running out of ressources again.

 

[pfiltz]

Take a look at this list of software that you could selfhost on your PVE server: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
I always find new software I want to selfhost so I'm running out of ressources and need to upgrade my existing servers or even buy additional servers. But be aware, selfhosting can be addictive. Started with a Single core, 512MB, RAM Raspi1B and 16GB SD card and now I got 3 servers with 32 cores, 112GB RAM, 20 SSDs, 10 HDDs and I'm still running out of ressources again.

DUDE ! 20 SSD's & 10 HDD... ! I guess size matters...

 

[Dunuin]

DUDE ! 20 SSD's & 10 HDD... ! I guess size matters...

As soon as you take your storage serious and do it more professional you need alot of drives because you can only use a fraction of the capacity.

Lets say for example I got 8x 4TB HDDs and 4x 250GB SSDs. In theory I got 33TB of storage. But actually usable for data are only 6.5TB.

First you always need atleast one backup. So I need to do everything twice to be able to have a copy on it on another machine. So only 4 HDDs and 2 SSDs are left for actual data because the other half is used for backups. Then I don't want to loose all my data in case a disk dies so I need some kind of raid with parity. Parity is also needed if you don't want your data to silently corrupt over time (bit rot) so the filesystem can heal itself. So I would choose a ZFS raidz1 (similar to a raid5) for the HDDs so of the 4 HDDs only 3 can store data and 1 will just store parity. Now I'm down from 16TB to 12TB. HDDs got a terrible IOPS performance so I would use a SSD as a ZFS "special device" to store the metadata on it to speed up the HDDs. But you can't just use a single SSD for that because if that single SSD would die all data on all HDDs would be lost too. Therefore I would need to use atleast 2 SSDs for that and mirror them. So of the 500GB of the SSDs only 250GB is acutally usable. So HDDs and SSDs together now only give me 12.25TB of capacity.
Then a ZFS pool should be never filled more then 80% because it is using copy-on-write and will get slow and starts to rapidly fragment otherwise. So of the 12.25TB only 9.8TB are usable. And then I want to be safe against ransomware so I need to use snapshots and I need to store them atleast for several weeks (which means nothing can be deleted for weeks). The snapshots might also need alot of space so I want 33% of my capacity to be reserved for snapshots. Now I'm down to 6.53TB of storage that I can acutually store data on.

So yes, 8x HDDs + 4x SSDs sound like a lot of storage but actually I can store less on it than normal consumers would store on a single 8TB HDD for 140€.

 

[pfiltz]

Hello D
Trust me. I'm very well aware of multiple backups. I'm kind of anal about it. I had to pay a data recovery outfit once 1500.00 to recover data. I actually have 3 backups for the company I work for. One is sent to the cloud. One is sent to a NAS at the far end of the building, and the other is local to the room where the server sits. Once a week, and run an image on the entire server using Macrium Reflect. Daily it runs backups of the data volume.

I've had to recover data once due to ransomware at the plant. Backup / Backup / Backup...