Proxmox roadmap - future direction of snapshot‑as‑volume‑chain

J

jatrn

Active Member
Jan 9, 2020
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Hi Proxmox Team,
Due to recent licensing changes from Broadcom, we are planning to migrate our current VMware environment to Proxmox VE.
We currently use a fibre‑channel–connected storage array (SAN) shared between servers.
My main question is about the future roadmap for shared storage snapshots on Proxmox:
  1. Is Proxmox planning to move the snapshot‑as‑volume‑chain feature from technology preview to fully supported status in upcoming releases?
  2. Or is there another mechanism / technology planned that would allow us to keep our current setup:
    • FC‑connected storage array attached to Proxmox nodes,
    • some kind of filesystem or storage layer on top that supports snapshots and can be used as shared storage in a Proxmox cluster?
 
I understand that the premise here is to continue using the existing SAN storage.

  1. Is Proxmox planning to move the snapshot‑as‑volume‑chain feature from technology preview to fully supported status in upcoming releases?
Click to expand...

As I understand it, there has been no public statement so far that snapshot-as-volume-chain will become fully supported in future releases.
Personally, given the demand for this feature, I hope and expect that it will eventually move toward full support.

That said, snapshot-as-volume-chain does not behave exactly the same as traditional snapshots, and it currently has some limitations.
For example, rollback is only possible to the most recent snapshot. Also, since snapshot volumes are currently thick-provisioned, capacity constraints need to be taken into account.

Or is there another mechanism / technology planned that would allow us to keep our current setup
Click to expand...

If the storage vendor provides a storage plugin for Proxmox, that may allow shared storage to be integrated more naturally.
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage_Plugin_Development
https://kb.blockbridge.com/guide/proxmox/

Given that, if you want to avoid a major storage redesign and also do not want to wait for snapshot-as-volume-chain to become fully supported, then using PBS with backup plus live restore may also be a practical option.
With qmrestore --live-restore, the VM can be started as soon as the restore begins, which can reduce downtime compared with a normal restore.

Of course, this is not equivalent to snapshot rollback. VM snapshots can include the memory state, but backups do not include RAM state.
So, if you can accept restart-based recovery instead of an immediate rollback including memory state, PBS seems like a very realistic option.
 
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