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Help with my Proxmox-Setup (feddit.org)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by doctorflynt@feddit.org to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I‘ve got 2 Machines with Proxmox on both installed. One hosts my data and media and runs Services like Jellyfin, NAS,… The other one is a Mini-PC that hosts my Services like Adguard, Home Assistant,…

Whats the best way to Backup the data and configs of those 2 machines? Installing Proxmox Backup Server on each and store the Backups on a seperate HDD? Or would it be better if a move all the services to a single machine and use the second only for backups?

thank you!

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[–] hamsda@feddit.org 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I use 1 host running Proxmox VE (PVE) with a VM for Proxmox BS (PBS). Datastores are located on a USB HDD with passthrough of that specific USB ID to the PBS VM.

It works really well and the only actual downside is that, for a complete-restore (e.g. reinstall PVE or new server or hard drives) you need to set up the PBS VM again before you can use your backups.

For the host-config on PVE, I use a systemd service and timer starting a simple proxmox-backup-client backup of /etc. That is enough to restore the configuration in case of some emergency.

Also: Is there a benefit for splitting your services on 2 hosts? Shouldn't 1 host with all VMs consume less electricity than the same VMs split on multiple hosts?

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Is there a benefit for splitting your services on 2 hosts?

I don't know about OPs situation, but I have a mini-PC as proxmox hypervisor too addition to my main server. Mini-PC is located middle-ish of the house as it's running home assistant with ZWA-2 and the location helps a lot with Z-wave coverage. But added benefit is that I can (within the pretty strict resource limits) move VMs to the mini-pc when doing maintenance on main server. It's pretty handy to move PiHole and some other small stuff to another host so that everything on network still functions even if one hypervisor is down.

[–] doctorflynt@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

while the machines are physicaly next to esch other i also runy whole home automation over zwave. the reason i have 2 machines currently is that the media server used to run truenas and i virtualized everything there. since truenas deprecated its public build repository i wanted to replace it with open media vault, but since i dont really used shares i figured that proxmox would be better suited. so i set up a machine where i host all the services until i figure out how i want to run my media-server.

i still need to find a way to setup a simple sambashare via a web gui and a good backup solution.

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

i still need to find a way to setup a simple sambashare via a web gui and a good backup solution.

I'm running openmediavault as an VM for file shares and backups with proxmox backup server. Works pretty well. I've got a physical backup server in detached garage and another in a VPS which syncs the most important parts to remote location.

[–] hamsda@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Interesting. I do not know a lot about Home Assistant devices, but I thought they would just be communicating via standard WIFI + data encryption. I definitely didn't suspect there to be a whole new standard of wireless communication to that.

I understand the thing about downtime, running pihole myself. My setup is rather simple and centralized on purpose and I don't really mind the few minutes of "filtered DNS" downtime while pihole and pve are rebooting. As my UniFi Dream Router 7 is the firewall / gateway / DHCP server anyway, I just use pihole as primary DNS and 1.1.1.1 as secondary DNS. It's not filtering "bad domains" via DNS, sure, but I got adblock origin and other browser extensions dealing with whatever comes along anyway.

But, yeah, for redundancy and always-online-production-setups it's actually great having a secondary pve as a temporary stop-gap. Plus, it's a nice and kinda fancy setup, of course. Always appreciated in selfhosted :)

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

I definitely didn’t suspect there to be a whole new standard of wireless communication to that.

There's multiple. Some devices are on wifi, some on z-wave and as zigbee is getting quite a lot of support from vendors I'll likely add that to the mix soon-ish. Also I could use bluetooth for some automations, but at least for now I don't really see any advantages over that.

As for pihole, it's main DNS server for devices in my network and rest of the family uses the net quite a lot too (IPTV and streaming services included) so any longer downtime would cause at least annoyance for them so it's nice to have an option to keep things running and take my time to maintain hardware or whatever. I of course could change DHCP server to offer something else too, but it's simpler and faster to just migrate a VM to another host.

[–] doctorflynt@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How does it work if my ssd dies, where proxmox boot and the lvm for the containers is located on? Would i have to reinstall proxmox + pbs again and then id be able to restore the disk again? or do i habe to install pbs on another drive altogether and then id be able to restore my boot drive + lvm?

the machines are located next to each other and i run 2 currently because 1 was originally a truenas server and the other one a proxmox-server with my services. Since truenas stopped publishing its open source code to github i reinstalled it with proxmox. im also just started setting everything up and i wanted to have my services running while i figure out how i want to run my media server. originally i tried open media vault instead of truenas, but since i virtualize stuff like jellyfin anyways i thought that running that directly in proxmox is easier.

if that n100 cpu can run everything i need on the media server, i want to move the containers over. otherwise the two n100 machines stay.

[–] hamsda@feddit.org 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How does it work if my ssd dies, where proxmox boot

If you only have 1 disk on your server (no RAID), you will have to

buy a disk
install in server
reinstall Proxmox VE
Install Proxmox BS
have a regular backup on some other disk (e.g. USB HDD) to restore other VMs from

and the lvm for the containers is located on?

Are you talking about containers (lxc, docker) or the VM disks? You need a backup for VM disks anyway (Proxmox BS).

If you're talking about containers, I do not know how to backup those. I do use docker containers but they're all inside VMs. I like to seperate things via VMs, as a rogue container taking down it's VM (or having other negative effects on its host) is less of a headache than a rogue container taking down the whole hypervisor because it's running directly on the that.

For comparison, this is my disk setup for my server (my old PC):

# lsblk
nvme0n1     259:0    0 465.8G  0 disk
nvme1n1     259:1    0 465.8G  0 disk
sda           8:0    0   3.6T  0 disk
sdb           8:16   0   3.6T  0 disk
sdc           8:32   0   3.6T  0 disk

# zpool list
NAME        SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP    HEALTH  ALTROOT
data_raid  10.9T  2.40T  8.51T        -         -    26%    21%  1.00x    ONLINE  -
rpool       460G  7.31G   453G        -         -     8%     1%  1.00x    ONLINE  -

The 2 NVME-disks are used in a ZFS mirror (rpool in zpool list above) and store the Proxmox OS. The 3 SATA SSDs (see sd* in lsblk above) are housing all VM data in a ZFS RAID-Z1 called data_raid. With this hardware- and RAID-setup, one disk of each zpool could die right now and all I'd have to do is pay the currently horrendous hardware-prices and replace it. No data-loss or downtime until at least 2 disks of a single zpool die together.

All hardware dies at some point. Preperation is key.

[–] doctorflynt@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My Mainboard only supports a single nvme-drive. thats why i store the os and the data of my vm/lxc on it. everything else are good old hdd. is it possible to restore this drive, if i install pbs as a lxc on this very drive?

sorry, i tried to read through some guids already and the more i read the more im confused /(

[–] hamsda@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You should not be able to restore the whole drive, like you would restore a VM. This is because you would first need to have Proxmox VE already running to restore the drive which runs Proxmox VE.

If your NVME drive dies, you would have to do what I outlined above:

get new NVME drive, install in server
install Proxmox VE manually
install Proxmox BS manually (either lxc container or VM)
give Proxmox BS access to backups on external HDD
restore whatever you backed up

Though, to reiterate, I do not know anything about lxc containers.

I did go through the Proxmox VE backup settings on my server, but I could not find a way to backup lxc containers, only VMs. So maybe Proxmox VE does not support backing up lxc containers? Or maybe it just does not show any lxc container backup option because I do not run any lxc containers?

I did find this github about Proxmox VE and LXC containers, but I didn't test it and it only has 1 star, so I'd be wary.

As a tipp: Even if your motherboard only supports 1 NVME drive, you might still be able to use multiple. You could buy a PCIe card with M.2 NVME slots, if you have any unused PCIe slots on your mainboard. With this, you should still be able to have a RAID setup.

[–] doctorflynt@feddit.org 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

thx for that write up. seems i didnt understand you correctly the first time (english is not my native language). i already used all pci-slots with sata extensions and a nic. its just a mini atx board with a n100 cpu, so my options are limited. i could mirror the disk to a sata ssd though.

[–] hamsda@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago

No problem, english isn't my native language either.

In the end, it just boils down to: are you okay with a downtime while reinstalling the hypervisor and restoring from backups? If yes, you don't need a RAID. If no, a RAID of some kind would probably be the most sensible choice.

[–] hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I have different vms which all write to an smb mount.

Then I have another VM that runs duplicati and mounts that smb share, but also another one just for the backups. And only this duplicati container has access to the backup share, which isolates my backups for security reasons. The only thing still involved and able to read and manipulate my data is the router which can see all the traffic.

Now idk if this is the best setup, but it feels secure to me and it works for me. Maybe more experienced people can chime in to agree or disagree.

[–] galacticworm@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

I have a proxmox with a backup share sitting on the nas.. rebuild is simply to rebuild a new proxmost host , attach same backup storage and restore backups. I have rebuilt a couple of times, back up and running in less than an hour

[–] primesummit84965@lemmy.1095.me 1 points 1 week ago

@doctorflynt — skip Proxmox Backup Server. Two commands and a cron job beat one more service. On the data/media machine: zfs snapshot pool/media@$(date +%F). On the Mini-PC: rsync -a /etc /home /usr/local /mnt/nas/mini-pc/$(date +%F)/. That’s it. Rebuild either machine in under an hour from those folders. I added duplicity to push to Backblaze B2 once a week as insurance, but recovery from local snapshots is instant. If either box catches fire, swap drives, restore configs, reinstall services, import media. No PBS cluster, no RAID, no drama. My one-pager of exact commands is at https://cxgo.ai/l/V23Nn8d if you want the ugly details.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip -1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Install one pbs on the big server. If you have the space, set up replication so you have another local copy. Best practice is to also keep an offsite copy, either with cloud storage or external drives you rotate, in case something happens to the stuff at your house.

[–] doctorflynt@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

so two pbs would be overkill?

[–] nexttech@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

what the heck is pbs

[–] doctorflynt@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago

proxmox backup server