PVE and PBS on same computer : disks management?

[Thatoo]

Hello,

I have a computer which have currently 4 HDD of 8TB each but I may be able to add one SSD to it.
I want to install a PVE for pre-production that I would use during the day and a PBS that would receive backup from prod computer at night.
I wonder if I should either :
- install PVE and PBS on a 1 TB RAID 10 (on 4 HDD) ZFS rpool and create a 15 TB RAID 10 (on the same 4 HDD) ZFS datastore to store PBS backups?
- or add an SSD on which I would install PVE AND PBS and create a 16 TB RAID 10 (on the 4 HDD) ZFS datastore to store PBS backups?

I wonder :
- is it possible to have two ZFS pool on the 4 same HDD and what happen when one of the HDD will die? Can I replace it as easily as I do when I have only one ZFS pool on 4 HDD?
- if I add the SSD and I have only one ZFS pool on the 4 HDD, then I know how to replace it, but how to handle pve and pbs installation when the SSD will die and I will have to replace it. Can I simply change the SSD, make a new install of PVE and PBS on the new SSD and attach back the exisitng datastore on the RAID 10 ZFS pool?

 

[Thatoo]

One last wonder that might solve everything. Is it possible to use PVE's 16TB ZFS RAID 10 rpool as a datastore in PBS?
Like that I have only one ZFS zpool of 16 TB on which I install PVE and PBS, somme testing VM and the datastore too.

 

[_gabriel]

if Windows :
Remember Windows is slow on HDD.
Worst as VM on ZFS "Raid10" on 4x HDD.

Storing backups on same disks as source isn't really a backup, or maybe can be called "backup only if human error" :-/ moreover restoring data from PBS to same disks will require many many many time, as PBS wants iops not sequential speed. backup will be slow too but thanks to dirty map and dedup will be mitigated which give false hope.

(sorry for wording)

 

[Thatoo]

No, it's not for windows.

Again, PVE would be used only for testing and pre prod VM so I won't backup them and PBS will get backup from other PVE from other remote computers.

 

[Thatoo]

I'd say that the main usage is PBS and PVE is secondary. I think pbs will be use mostly during night so I was wondering who I can use this computer during the day and that's how I got the idea to use it for test and preprod VM.

 

[Neobin]

One last wonder that might solve everything. Is it possible to use PVE's 16TB ZFS RAID 10 rpool as a datastore in PBS?
Like that I have only one ZFS zpool of 16 TB on which I install PVE and PBS, somme testing VM and the datastore too.

A PBS datastore is nothing more than a directory.
So, sure, you can simply create a new directory or, what I would highly recommend, a dataset, which you use (exclusively) for the/a datastore.

 

[leesteken]

I always run PBS as a (small and unprivileged Debian) container on PVE (and it can backup itself while running, except for the datastore). That way, I can easily give it access to a mounted storage directory on the physical server using a lxc.mount.entry: in the container configuration file (so PVE does not know about it and it does not delete it on a restore).