Proxmox Cluster Backup

[paulca]

Hi, I'm currently evaluating ProxmoxVE cluster for our company and I'm having a couple of problems.


I have created a proxmox cluster with 4 nodes.
I virtualised all our development systems and now have 12 VM's all running on node 1.
I do not wish to get into the complexities of HA and fencing, I'd rather keep things as simple as possible, so what I want to do is as follows:-


(1) Spread the 12 VM's over the 4 nodes.


(2) Set up backup jobs for each VM so that a backup is taken each night onto a different node.... for example say Node1 has VMs 101,102,103. I may wish to backup VM101 to Node2:/backups and VM102 to Node3:/backups.


I tried doing a migrate of a simple shutdown VM from Node 1 to Node 4. In the web console it looked like it had worked incredibly quickly , the VM image left node 1 and appeared on node 4. The disk image however did not move and I had to manually rsync it over to node 4 to get the VM functional again.

I could obviously set up manual rsync cron jobs to move the images around the cluster, but I'd rather use the proxmox features which will hopeful make restoring the VM backup to a different node after a disaster simple.


Can you please advise me on how I can (a) migrate my VM's without the manual rsync, and (b) backup across the cluster onto a different node and restor to a different node.


Best Regards
Paul.

 

[paulca]

Aha....I had an old known_hosts entry for the target node which was breaking the migration, this is fixed now. Just need a strategy for backing up from one cluster node to another .....any suggestions ?

I did notice that I had to shutdown the VM before migrating as the VM used "local storage". How do I make the "live online" migration work ?

 

[DirkB]

You probably build all VMs on local storage on node 1?
Use shared storage for the VMs to migrate them around, no rsync needed.
The backup storage has to be a) available on the node from which you want to backup a VM and b) marked as backup storage (which local storage is not). So either use external storage (ex. via nfs) or partition the disks on your nodes accordingly to create separate backup storage.
BTW: Why do you want to backup "inside" your node cluster? What if the whole party burns down?

Dirk

 

[paulca]

Thanks Dirk, This is just a demo system to show proxmox in action to the business so they can consider employing it in other areas. We do not have a SAN or NAS storage device available to us mere developers, and to be honest I thought it'd be fairly trivial to tell a node to backup to a different node in the same cluster.

I've tried creating an NFS export on node4, by creating and editing /etc/exports, but it doesn't work, and I'm concerned about breaking the node. I've noticed a exports file in /proc/fs/nfs/exports , but that is read-only. How could I create an NFS export on Node 4 , then add it as a storage for backups in proxmox.

 

[DirkB]

Paul,

even if you could edit the properties for ex. the local storage of node 4 to allow backups you-d have to export /var/lib/vz and than create kind of a little mess in having backups and vms mixed in one storage. It is possible but i would defiently not recommend it.
Proxmox grabs all disk space it can see during installation for root and local storage (pve) so you could either
- reduce the size of lvm and VG for pve data
- make a quick reinstall using parameters to size the proxmox partitions (see http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Debugging_Installation for the parameters)

In both cases you-d get free space on the node where you can create additional storage for backup which can than be exported via nfs and used by other nodes

Dirk