Re:Looking Glass: Run a Windows VM on Linux in a window with...
by Cyph0n on Sunday July 18, 2021 @05:52PM
(#27877017)
1. In my case, VM image SSDs are formatted using LVM-Thin. Based on this, Proxmox automatically takes care of snapshotting the VM images for backups. It would work the same if you used ZFS for image storage.
2. No, I do not currently backup the Proxmox config. There is a good script here: https://github.com/DerDanilo/proxmox-stuff
3. If you install Proxmox on a "thin" filesystem (ZFS or LVM-Thin), then yes, you will get snapshot functionality for free. Note that you would have to configure this yourself - Proxmox does not expose a backup feature for its own config.
4. I have two NVMe SSDs. The first is 500GB and is split into two partitions: 100GB for the Proxmox install (LVM + ext4), and 400GB for VM images and containers (LVM-Thin). The second is 900GB and is fully used for VM images. Both are using LVM.
* Are the VM image backups you mentioned, done to your pool by means of the ZFS snapshots? Or done at the file-level with rsync or similar.
* Do you make backups of the Proxmox installation? Similar as before: is Proxmox itself on a ZFS volume, so backups can be done just by doing ZFS snapshots? The installer lets me choose between an LVM-Thin + ext4, or a ZFS filesystem, and I was wondering whether to choose one or the other, for maximum convenience.
* "Proxmox is installed on an SSD": isn't that a bit wasteful? I mean, doesn't the Proxmox system just take like 1 or 2 GB at most?
I have a Lenovo ThinkCentre m910q which brings a 160GB M.2 NVMe disk, and another 320GB SSD disk... so I an in the process of deciding where to put each thing. Although for bigger storage I'm also considering if adding a 1 or 2 TB USB3 external disk would make sense (to store user backups like photos, documents, and also for the server's system backups)