Long post. Sorry! But any advice would be very much appreciated.
I'm going to be setting up a two node cluster with 4x SSDs in RAID10 via a hardware RAID card (so NOT zfs). All storage will therefore be local.
I'll be moving from Virtuozzo, where I have a very simple ext4 filesystem setup with a directory /vz which contains both backups (in /vz/backups) and Container data (in /vz/private)
For testing and learning, I've installed Proxmox 5.2 on a couple of old servers with 500Gb disks, and basically used the defaults for pretty much everything during installation.
With these defaults, I've found that I have Storage "local" at 100Gb and storage "local-lvm" at 365Gb.
"local" seems to be where backups and ISO images and so on get stored. local-lvm seems to be where VM disk images get stored.
~# cat /etc/pve/storage.cfg
dir: local
path /var/lib/vz
content backup,vztmpl,iso
lvmthin: local-lvm
thinpool data
vgname pve
content rootdir,images
In this test configuration, I would have less than 100Gb for backups and 365Gb for vm disks.
What I want is not to have these restrictions - for both backups, ISOs and vm disks to be in the same "storage" so that I don't have to worry about running out of space on one or the other.
Can I achieve this single storage setup without huge drawbacks? I am pretty certain I need to use lvm-thin for this storage, because otherwise I won't be able to thin provision the VM disks. Can backups/isos/snapshots be stored in lvm-thin? I suspect not.
If I can't do what I want in this way, I will have to add a separate high capacity SATA drive and create a new storage to use for backups. This will add cost that I would like to avoid if at all possible.
*** If you have had a suitable amount of coffee today, you may be thinking "why does he want to store backups on the same machine? That's crazy! If something really bad happens, the backups are gone too!"
Well I don't actually want to store backups locally. I want the backups from one node to be stored on the other node in the cluster. In Virtuozzo I could do this easily with no extra setup - the vzbackup backup command allowed me to specify a different node to store the backup. But as far as I can tell I cannot do this in Proxmox :-( My plan is therefore to rsync backups to the other node after a backup is complete, then delete the local copy of the backup. I'm hoping, however, than someone can suggest a better way to do it? Have I missed some vital feature that allows me to do what I want more easily than I think?
Unfortunately two nodes is all I can afford, so I can't add a third machine that has some kind of shared storage just for backups.
I'm going to be setting up a two node cluster with 4x SSDs in RAID10 via a hardware RAID card (so NOT zfs). All storage will therefore be local.
I'll be moving from Virtuozzo, where I have a very simple ext4 filesystem setup with a directory /vz which contains both backups (in /vz/backups) and Container data (in /vz/private)
For testing and learning, I've installed Proxmox 5.2 on a couple of old servers with 500Gb disks, and basically used the defaults for pretty much everything during installation.
With these defaults, I've found that I have Storage "local" at 100Gb and storage "local-lvm" at 365Gb.
"local" seems to be where backups and ISO images and so on get stored. local-lvm seems to be where VM disk images get stored.
~# cat /etc/pve/storage.cfg
dir: local
path /var/lib/vz
content backup,vztmpl,iso
lvmthin: local-lvm
thinpool data
vgname pve
content rootdir,images
In this test configuration, I would have less than 100Gb for backups and 365Gb for vm disks.
What I want is not to have these restrictions - for both backups, ISOs and vm disks to be in the same "storage" so that I don't have to worry about running out of space on one or the other.
Can I achieve this single storage setup without huge drawbacks? I am pretty certain I need to use lvm-thin for this storage, because otherwise I won't be able to thin provision the VM disks. Can backups/isos/snapshots be stored in lvm-thin? I suspect not.
If I can't do what I want in this way, I will have to add a separate high capacity SATA drive and create a new storage to use for backups. This will add cost that I would like to avoid if at all possible.
*** If you have had a suitable amount of coffee today, you may be thinking "why does he want to store backups on the same machine? That's crazy! If something really bad happens, the backups are gone too!"
Well I don't actually want to store backups locally. I want the backups from one node to be stored on the other node in the cluster. In Virtuozzo I could do this easily with no extra setup - the vzbackup backup command allowed me to specify a different node to store the backup. But as far as I can tell I cannot do this in Proxmox :-( My plan is therefore to rsync backups to the other node after a backup is complete, then delete the local copy of the backup. I'm hoping, however, than someone can suggest a better way to do it? Have I missed some vital feature that allows me to do what I want more easily than I think?
Unfortunately two nodes is all I can afford, so I can't add a third machine that has some kind of shared storage just for backups.
