Proxmox Backup - Datastore creation taking forever

[N0AGI]

hi everyone,
first a quick summary of my current env.

I have an instance of Proxmox Backup Server 3.2-6 running on a standalone DELL box - dashboard details of this below.


I have a CIFS mount point on this server pointing to a remote unraid server share. I have started to create a datastore on this mount point.

Issue:
The process of creating the ".chunks" for this datastore creation is taking forever. It seems to crawl at ~2min per chunck. Screenshot below


Not sure what the hold up is or cause of this latency. Is there any config that I am missing or should be taking a look at.

thanks in advance

 

[Chris]

hi everyone,
first a quick summary of my current env.

I have an instance of Proxmox Backup Server 3.2-6 running on a standalone DELL box - dashboard details of this below.
View attachment 70760

I have a CIFS mount point on this server pointing to a remote unraid server share. I have started to create a datastore on this mount point.

Issue:
The process of creating the ".chunks" for this datastore creation is taking forever. It seems to crawl at ~2min per chunck. Screenshot below
View attachment 70761

Not sure what the hold up is or cause of this latency. Is there any config that I am missing or should be taking a look at.

thanks in advance

Hi,
this is expected. There can be significant overhead using a NFS/CIFS shares as backing storage for a datastore. Therefore local storages are recommended, see https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#recommended-server-system-requirements

 

[UdoB]

I have a CIFS mount point on this server pointing to a remote unraid server share. I have started to create a datastore on this mount point.

This is really the worst construction I can imagine!

PBS is meant to be installed on bare metal using SSDs (or NVMe).

Sorry for this blunt statement. If you read some posts you will find similar posts...

 

[UdoB]

More constructive: having a dedicated Dell box for PBS is great! How many drives can you install?

Recommended setup: a storage pool consisting of SSDs - which is considered expensive by most user.

My "cheap" approach: 4 or 6 or 8 or ... mirrors (always mirrors!) as rotating rust. Plus 2 mirrored SSD/NVMe as a "Special Device". The Special Device may be small: 1 to 2 percent of the net. capacity is enough. For example: 6 * 6TB = ~18 TB data --> 180 GB is large enough.

Of course I am talking "ZFS" here. Just my 2 €...

 

[N0AGI]

Hi,
this is expected. There can be significant overhead using a NFS/CIFS shares as backing storage for a datastore. Therefore local storages are recommended, see https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#recommended-server-system-requirements

thank you for the link; Quite helpful and points me to the right way to config. I will take a look at moving the datastore to a local path and perhaps set an rsync to my unraid for redundancy.

Recommended Server System Requirements​

• CPU: Modern AMD or Intel 64-bit based CPU, with at least 4 cores
• Memory: minimum 4 GiB for the OS, filesystem cache and Proxmox Backup Serverdaemons. Add at least another GiB per TiB storage space.
• OS storage:
  • 32 GiB, or more, free storage space
  • Use a hardware RAID with battery protected write cache (BBU) or aredundant ZFS setup (ZFS is not compatible with a hardware RAIDcontroller).
• Backup storage:
  
  • Use only SSDs, for best results
  • If HDDs are used: Using a metadata cache is highly recommended, for example,add a ZFS special device mirror.
  • While it's technically possible to use remote storages such as NFS or SMB,the additional latency and overhead drastically reduces performance and it'snot recommended to use such a setup.

 

[Chris]

thank you for the link; Quite helpful and points me to the right way to config. I will take a look at moving the datastore to a local path and perhaps set an rsync to my unraid for redundancy.

Some additional information in case you are not aware of this: PBS provides also sync jobs which allow you to pull the contents to an offsite/remote Proxmox Backup Server instance, details about this you can find in the documentation https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/managing-remotes.html#sync-jobs