Proxmox Backup Server – Best setup for External Storage

nqservices

Hi all,

I want to use PBS using 2 servers: one VM to host the PBS GUI (with SSD disks) and a dedicated server only for storage (with HDD disks). Both will be hosted on the same datacenter due to latency.

About this, two questions that I appreciate feedback from people with experience using it:

1- Will it work properly? I been researching and found many people saying that external storage is a lot slower. What are the main cons vs using it all in 1 single server?

2- What’s the best option in terms of setup for the external storage server? Meaning what the best/fastest connection protocol (SSHFS, CIFS, etc..) and adequate filesystem (Ext4, ZFS, etc..)?

Thanks!

remy

We need the number of VMs you need to backup / the frequency / the amount of data

I'm doing it with VPSs that are in different datacenters and not in the same country.
The only difference is that my storage server has an SSD.
But I'm only backing up 3 virtual machines and we're only talking about 100GB of data.... It works fine.
They're incremental backups anyway and my data doesn't change that much.
So basically, we really need to know how much data we're talking about.
Because for light use, any setup will work

EDIT: Okay, I didn't understand the specificity of the setup. Although I'm not sure it's worth doing this....

nqservices

@remy said:
We need the number of VMs you need to backup / the frequency / the amount of data

Thanks for the response! Information below:

Number of servers: 24 servers (20 KVM VMs and 4 dedicated) all hosted around the world.
Amount of data: +/- 10TB.
Frequency: Most of the servers will be 1 daily and for 3 servers I need backups every 4 hours.
Type of Backup: Most will be incremental. For 3 or 4 will be full backups (around 1TB)

remy

I have never used promox backup server with this volume of data. And so apart from giving you advice based on the knowledge I have on the protocols...this will not replace experience with PBS. I think a provider here will be able to advise you better, because they are used to these volumes of data.

Pilzbaum

@nqservices said: For 3 or 4 will be full

Can PBS even do non incremental backups? I thought this isn't possible with their chunking.

And for one, what would be your gain out of using the SSD server + HDD instead of the HDD directly? I'm not quite sure if any such setup actually increases performance instead of using HDD directly (might be if for instance better network connectivity or faster CPU)

I'd normally go for HDD directly
If not, for FS maybe NFS to the HDD and/or maybe rclone to allow some caching (but no idea how this plays out with PBS, as the data store needs to rely on the HDD server), but I still imagine that to be slower

Pilzbaum

For 1.
I think it will work, but will be slower, more resource hogging => more expensive, more maintenance to do and generally not better than the single HDD setup (there might be some cases tho)

For 2. if possible unencrypted between the two servers (but then private LAN or so!) for performance, therefore rather not SSHFS.
NFS should be fine, even FTP, CIFS as well. I'd go with ext4 probably. If you can setup ZFS on the HDD server as well (remember >=1GB RAM per 1TB storage, rule of thumb), PBS could be on it already.
No deduplication or compression of the FS, just adds overhead imho.

The web GUI won't load faster if it's on the SSD server. Further this isn't really important for the backups.

Also, PBS appears pretty slow to me the higher the latency gets to the pbs-clients

Maybe test if you even can max out your link with the SSD server for a test backup and then do the same to the HDD server