PBS. Swap. What do ya think?

[tcabernoch]

I got a lousy piece of hardware as a backup server.
It's RAM-starved, low-cpu, and really old. Lovely gear.

I'll attach capacity storage, but the root drive is a 64gb SSD.
Like, the SSD is the only good thing about the box.
I, the ZFS disciple, am considering LVM for it.
I was also considering using a good chunk of it as swap.

What do we think about swap and PBS?

 

[dherzig]

Hi tcabernoch,

well, there shouldn't be any issues with swap and pbs by itself -- in fact, if you chose ext4 or xfs as filesystem during installation, you'll be getting some if you do not actively opt-out [0]. The maximum you can set is hdsize/8.

Are you serious about putting your backups onto 'RAM-starved, low-cpu, and really old' hardware? The 64gb SSD rootdisk does not sound to fresh as well...

Please take a look at the docs about system recommendations [1]. I actually very much appreciate the sustainable approach you describe, but 'lousy piece of hardware' and backups somehow makes me shiver .

Best,
Daniel

[0] https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#advanced-lvm-configuration-options
[1] https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#recommended-server-system-requirements

 

[tcabernoch]

Lol. Well thanks for the tech info Daniel. Yes, I'm considering ext4. I don't normally use that for a Proxmox-based server. You've answered my question.

I didn't clearly define the architecture I'm building. The data disk will be iSCSI to an NFS dataset on TrueNAS. The very heart of virtualization and the philosophy behind it is that the hardware is irrelevant. In this case, the performance of the physical hardware, despite being miserable, probably exceeds that of the current host, which is a guest of TrueNAS.
Crucially, the data disk can be re-attached to another PBS should this hardware fail. This is an improvement.

As for reviewing the system requirements, try reviewing this forum. Take a look at what people are actually doing with it. Follow some of my posts if you want to see how PBS can be extended to work beyond the narrow use case. Let us teach you how to use the product.