VM Incremental backup for 3-party solution
- Thread starter radekk
- Start date
That heavily depends on your "Third Party Solution". In general we have our own backup implementation directly in QEMU for both VMA and PBS, both are controlled by "vzdump" and related APIs from our perl code. Adding another solution is certainly not an easy undertaking.
You might get away without integrating into our stack too deeply if you manage your backups entirely externally from PVE, but you'd probably still need QEMU support to be able to take consistent backups (though I have heard some people just taking ZFS snapshots as backups, so ignoring QEMU entirely is an option if you don't value consistency too highly).
If you're not discouraged though, we appreciate all contributions
Check our current implementation on our git: https://git.proxmox.com/
The most interesting repositories will probably by pve-qemu, proxmox-backup-qemu and qemu-server (especially VZDump.pm).
You might get away without integrating into our stack too deeply if you manage your backups entirely externally from PVE, but you'd probably still need QEMU support to be able to take consistent backups (though I have heard some people just taking ZFS snapshots as backups, so ignoring QEMU entirely is an option if you don't value consistency too highly).
If you're not discouraged though, we appreciate all contributions
Check our current implementation on our git: https://git.proxmox.com/
The most interesting repositories will probably by pve-qemu, proxmox-backup-qemu and qemu-server (especially VZDump.pm).
Thanks @Stefan_R for your promptly answer.
In the recent years I've integrated Proxmox backups using vzdump in the 3-party backup solution - Bacula Enterprise - and it is working great.
I have a broad knowledge of the VM backup solutions as recently I've integrated the Block Level Snapshot-Based Incremental backups for XenServer using official API in the same backup product. I fully understand that it would be not an easy task especially when, as I understand it, no official API was designed. I'm not very familiar with your low-level backup code and I'm seeking some references and hints in these area. I'll appreciate any help as your git project repository is huge.
Radek
In the recent years I've integrated Proxmox backups using vzdump in the 3-party backup solution - Bacula Enterprise - and it is working great.
I have a broad knowledge of the VM backup solutions as recently I've integrated the Block Level Snapshot-Based Incremental backups for XenServer using official API in the same backup product. I fully understand that it would be not an easy task especially when, as I understand it, no official API was designed. I'm not very familiar with your low-level backup code and I'm seeking some references and hints in these area. I'll appreciate any help as your git project repository is huge.
Radek
I suggest taking a look at the projects I've mentioned above, as well as our developer documentation. For specific technical questions it is advisable to ask them on our pve-devel mailing list instead, we'd be glad to explain pieces of our code there if you need assistance (see the link in the developer docs).
Without concrete questions, I can't give you concrete answers Our pve-qemu code base is not that big, most of it uses upstream QEMU primitives together with our rust code linked in from proxmox-backup-qemu, so that might be a starting point.
Additionally, if your solution already has QEMU support, it might not even be necessary to patch anything, just ignore the PVE part and backup the QEMU instances directly.
Without concrete questions, I can't give you concrete answers
Our pve-qemu code base is not that big, most of it uses upstream QEMU primitives together with our rust code linked in from proxmox-backup-qemu, so that might be a starting point.Additionally, if your solution already has QEMU support, it might not even be necessary to patch anything, just ignore the PVE part and backup the QEMU instances directly.
If your backup solution can already backup virtual machines running under KVM/QEMU, you may not need to touch PVE code. PVE uses QEMU as it's underlying hypervisor, so anything that supports that will work on PVE VMs. QEMU is fairly widespread in virtualization, outside of PVE too (see libvirt for example).
Here's some documentation from upstream QEMU for example, on how they envision backups - many of the techniques discussed there are also in use by our own backup code: https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/interop/bitmaps.html