Path forward for current configuration, mirror and backup

[starbetrayer]

Dear community,

following the great advice I had received before, I was able to successfully complete my migration from VMware ESXi to Proxmox.
I was also able to configure my graphic card as passthrough to my windows 11 with great success (even fixed the audio issue).

Currently, I have the following hardware:

1 x 480GB Micron 7450 NMVe for the boot drive for Proxmox in ext4.

1 x 2TB Samsung SSD 870 EVO for the VM disk.

I realize that in my current setup, the 2TB is really the big point of failure as my VMs are currently not backed up.

Should I double the Samsung SSD 870 EVO? How do I do that? Should I go for a ZFS mirror then?

Concerning the backups, and reading through the forums, it appears that lots of you guys do backups of VMs to spinner disks due to costs.
How often do you backup your VMs?
Am I correct in saying that when the VMs are backup, they are put on hold? Do you do this during the night then?

I am looking forward to hearing your suggestions on how to improve my setup.

 

[Kingneutron]

Setup proxmox backup server on separate hardware. Minimal requirements, old quad-core laptop with 4-8GB RAM and 1-2TB SSD. Advantage: dedup. There are other features, but that's the killer one. You should be able to accomplish this for under $100 .. ~$150, and reliable backups are priceless. Somebody usually has a spare laptop, and you maybe have to invest in an SSD to replace a cheap/slow laptop spinner drive. USB3 external SSD drives are possible as well if you don't want to open the laptop case.

Critical VM/LXC get backed up every night and keep the last 5. Other VMs are backed up once a week, or for Windows once a month if they're mostly-off. Popular times to do backups are midnight or 2am, and enable fleecing if you get slowdowns

I actually have 4x PBS, 3 of which are currently active.

My Qotom PVE server backs up to a PBS VM on Beelink EQR6;
Beelink backs up to Qotom PBS VM,

...and they both back up to a 2018 Intel mac mini PVE+PBS VM with virtiofs passed through to a ZFS spinner mirror.

The 4th older PBS is on another 2018 mac mini that had PBS running under vmware fusion, and ^^ recently replaced it with 10Gbit thunderbolt3 networking and a 2.5Gbit usb-c adapter. Desktop virtualization is "ok" until you need fast networking, and Fusion only supports vmxnet3 and not virtio. Virtualbox virtio is still slow enough that you won't get wire-speed 2.5Gbit out of it. Proxmox is fast.

I also practice restores ~monthly to a VM, and have successfully restored an entire non-clustered node from PBS.

https://github.com/kneutron/ansitest/tree/master/proxmox

Look into the bkpcrit script, point it to external disk / NAS, run it nightly in cron. Search page for "bulk" and practice a DR restore.

 

[UdoB]

Am I correct in saying that when the VMs are backup, they are put on hold?

No

The used technology (Qemu) allows to "freeze" a machine and make a (temporary) snapshot. After this is done - which takes only a few seconds - the VM will continue to do whatever it is meant to do. Then the actual backup starts. Of course this invisible snapshot is removed when the backup has finished.

(Also this has nothing to do with a VM-snapshot or a ZFS-snapshot or xyz-snapshot - the term "snapshot" happens to have several orthogonal meanings...)

There is a much more detailed explanation somewhere in this forum.