Only RBD Storage

[MACscr]

Right now my hosts only have 8GB of local storage for the operating system. The primary storage for the containers and vm's is ceph rbd. I have a vanilla ubuntu server that im current using for backups. Now that I am looking to implement proxmox for all my systems, how do i go about having shared storage for the ISO's and container templates? Do I need to create an NFS share from my backup server where I have plenty of raw space? I dont need a lot of space for them, why cant they just reside within the ceph storage cluster?

As far as backups, since im using ceph, it supports snapshots. Can those snapshots be archived to a slower ceph pool (spindle disks) or somewhere else? If so, then how would proxmox handle the restore process, etc?

Thanks for your time. Promox 4.0 is looking good so far and I am glad Im able to revisit promox as a possible solution.

 

[mir]

For a 'read-only' storage for ISO and templates you could use this http://docs.ceph.com/docs/master/cephfs/ if you only want to use Ceph but IMHO a dedicated NFS server is much more convenient and a lot more stable and proven. You could create a NFS server in a VM on-top RBD if you haven't got a dedicated server for this purpose. Personally I use a Qnap NAS for both backup and NFS server for ISO and templates.

 

[Q-wulf]

As Mir mentioned NFS is alot better suited for Iso's. We use OpenMedia Vault's in HA VM's ontop of Ceph for that.


As far as Snapshots go:
This should give you a good idea.
http://docs.ceph.com/docs/v0.79/rbd/rbd-snapshot/
please be advised that snapshots are not true "backups" as the data still resides on the system in question. Consider em more of a restore point. Thats btw the reason we do not use em as Backups.


We backup our VM's to a secondary ceph cluster. On top of that we again run openmedia-vault VM's attached to the First Proxmox-Cluster. Its a SSD-Replicated Pool backed by a Erasure Coded HDD-Pool.
Which brings me to the second part of your question:
http://docs.ceph.com/docs/master/rados/operations/cache-tiering/
You can do Read-Write Cache-Pools or Read-Only Cache Pools.

Note:
- Erasure Coded Pools need Cache-Tiering to be pluggable into Proxmox via RDB.
- Do not forget propper replication for your "warm Data" containing pools if you use em in Read-Write mode