Proxmox Backup Server Saves You Money And Time!

hey everybody and welcome back to Jim's Garage today we're going to be looking at prox MOX backup server to make sure that our VMS are backed up in the best possible way so if you've been watching my videos you know that I've gone quite heavily into the worlds of backup strategies invoking things like a 321 for example we've also looked at tools like restic and rclone and certainly that restic should give you an idea or at least a hint as to why we're going down the prox mo backups server route now for those of you who've been using proxmox for a long time specifically the ve the virtual environment you'll know that it has a backup option within that and you might be thinking I've been using that it works fine why would I want to spin up something like proxmox backup server well as I just mentioned with things like restic where we saw the introduction of D duplication that's the exact benefit of using something like proxmox backup server so what's D duplication well think of it a bit like this if you're using proxmoxve every time you back up your machine it's creating a replica good but there's no logic or intelligence behind that so if you have a VM that's 50 gigs in size every single time you back that up you lose 50 gigs surely there's a better way yeah D duplication so what that means is it only backs up files that have change so you're always going to have to do that initial backup so that 50 gigs but if on a weekly basis you're backing up and you've only written a gig that means your next backup is likely to be much smaller around a gig so you can obviously see the benefits here and if we head over to my proxmox in a minute you'll see that in action so here over on my proxmox backup server you can see this interesting statistic here on the summary D duplication Factor 6 .12 so that means for all of the storage I'm using I've got eight groups with 24 snapshots that's basically 8 VMS I'm backing up and I keep the last three backups but I'm saving over six times the size as compared with doing it through proxmox V where it's doing those fullsize backups so in this video I'm going to show you how to deploy proxmox backup server how to integrate that with proxmox ve and give some general tips and guidance around Hardware choices for doing this let's get right into it so to begin the process we first need to download the iso and that's really straightforward so head over to the proxmox backup server website and then you need to head over to download section and we're going to be using proxmox backup server and we're going to be using version 3.0 ISO installer go ahead and download that and once you're done we'll move on to the next stage so the next stage is installation and it's no coincidence that I'm in proxmox so you might think traditionally that you want to install this on some bare metal and get that up and running you might want to then put lots of drives into that box and use it in that fashion and there's nothing particularly wrong with that but I like to virtualize my setup and I already have existing infrastructure set up for my backups so in this instance I'm going to virtualize proxmox backup server and that's what you can see on the screen and you can see this has been up and running for 108 days now the way this works is it's deployed onto my Dell which is part of my two node cluster yeah I know it should be three but this actually resides on my local nvme drive now this drive is a quad NVM and it's backed up with raids 2 so any two of those drives can fail now all of this is actually irrelevant now why is it irrelevant well whilst the server itself runs on here and I've got resiliency built in actually when we get into this post deployment and going back to my previous procm server it actually saves it to this location down here and as you can see this is 108 terabytes this is my tras so effectively all I'm doing is giving a very minimalist installation for proxmox backup server I want something light because it's not really going to be doing anything that intensive it's simply a web goey and some backend services so that I can use my existing traz with all of its raid two built into it but with the benefits of proxmox backup server giving me D duplication so whilst this is going to take up a little bit of CPU a little bit of RAM and a little bit of hard drive space to actually host This Server the benefits of of six times D duplication in my instance massively outweighs it so let's get onto installation okay so I've now hopped over to a fresh proxmox installation well tell a li it's actually one I've used for a previous demonstration but it suits the needs of this video perfect so we're now going to walk through the process to install proxmox backup server so this machine only has eight cores and 16 gigs of RAM but that's more than enough so I'm going to create a new virtual machine but before I do that I need to make sure that the iso installation media is available so to do that we want to move over to our local storage or wherever you're storing your isos this is just the default location and I'm going to upload so I'm going to select a file from my PC as I've already downloaded it before I'm going to hit open and then that should upload so once that's uploaded that's going to enable us to select select this as an installation media when we create the virtual machine so now that that's completed let's head over to create VM I'm going to choose this node obviously and I'm going to give it the name of proxmox backup server as this is a backup I want to make sure that it runs at boot and that's all I need to do on this screen so hit next now for the OS this is where where we can select what we just downloaded so here you see proxmox backup server 3 I'm going to click that one it is a guest type of Linux and it is using the 6.x kernel so we're going to hit next the system we can leave as default because we're not going to be doing anything fancy for it so no Q35 no pass through Etc if you wanted to do an all-in-one solution where you are passing your discs through two prox MOX in a virtualized environment you would need to have a Q35 machine go and check out my previous video on Hardware pass through to see how to do that so on the next screen as I mentioned I'm just using this as a Bare Bones basically the web gooey and the backend services so I don't need anything fancy and I don't need a large amount of storage so in this instance I'm just going to store it on the same location as proxmox has installed but if you've got nice fast local storage so maybe some ssds or nvme I recommend you choose that in terms of size I'm going to leave it at the default of 32 that's more than I need but I've got some to spare and you can tweak that down to probably something like 20 gigs I'm going to turn on SSD emulation so it enables trim for this virtual machine so that when something is marked for deletion it can actually go back and reclaim some of that space it's a handy feature not a lot of people probably know about that so hit next and then for CPU I've only got one socket in this machine it's an old consumer Intel I'm going to give it two c I'm going to change this to be a host so it gets the full feature Suite of the CPU and then I'm going to hit next for memory I'm going to give this 4 gigs of RAM and I'm going to disable ballooning just so it's got fixed allocation size and typically it's just going to hit that limit anyway in a short amount of time next onto Network again you need to tweak this to your settings as this is just a simple demonstration I'm not going to do anything fancy with any vlans so I'm going to leave it as default and then hit finish so now we get a summary of our virtual machine everything is fine to get this up and running so once that's being created we can then click on it over here and we're going to jump into the console to get this installation started so hopping over to the console let's hit start so I'm going to keep this simple and we're going to do the graphical installation as you can see it's picked up an IP address from my network so that's great often it will need to do software updates during the installation process so now we're here we can hit agree in the bottom right hand corner and once we hit agree we're asked which Target hard disk now I've only installed the one dis so I'm going to leave this as default but if you remember from my previous videos where we've installed proxmox for example you may have multiple drives here that you want to select and you can also do things like installing this in various raid configurations that's useful if you're going to be using this to pass through discs or it's on bare metal as I've said this will be installed locally on the proxmox drive but as I showed earlier in my production environment that's already on raid infrastructure and so I don't need to worry about specifying it within this virtual machine so I'm going to hit next next we're going to need to have a password once you've completed that you can hit the next and then it's going to ask you to set up your network now as I've got DHCP enabled this has been prepopulated for me so all of that looks good to me but obviously make sure you double check and you can actually reach this and it can reach things like the internet for the fqdn you can put in pretty much whatever you want you don't actually have to use this and you can rout it through things like your reverse proxy at a later time but maybe you want to give it something easy to remember so I'm going to call mine pbs. Jims garage. UK and I'm going to hit next then it's going to ask us to validate all of the installation options all of that looks fine and I'm going to let it reboot after an installation so let's hit install I'm going to skip this part of the video because there's nothing really to look at and I'll see you on the other side so now it's finished we're reminded of the IP address for this machine so you could see that it was 115 and then Port 807 so that's one port higher than proxmox so pretty easy to remember so now it's rebooted everything looks fine it's going to automatically start up so yeah welcome to Grub and it's doing the first steps for its first boot up that's great so now we can leave proxmox backup server and we can access it through the web guey and again here's just a gentle reminder on screen it's at 11587 for me remember if you want to access this through the web guey it does use a self-signed web certificate so you need https and so heading to that website we get the following warning it's a s sign certificate we want to ignore this and let's continue now hopefully we should reach the login screen and yes we do so let's log in and the username by default is root and put in your password that you specified during the installation process so once we've done that we're greeted with the dashboard now this looks almost identical to the machine I showed you before which was my production environment and everything looks to be up and running we've got two cores and it even reads out the CPU name because I did the host pass through and it has the 4 gigs of RAM that I specified so fingers crossed we're in a good position to get this up and running now so you could just use this Asis and create backups on this backup server if you provisioned it with commencer at hard drive space but the way I'm going to do it is to leverage my existing setup so in summary you can either use this as is or you can use some external storage most people will have an external Nas so that's what we're going to treat this one as now unfortunately there isn't a simple way of doing this through the guey we need to hop into the terminal and enable CFS CF UIL to be precise and then we need to mount the SMB share to a location within the virtual machine for proxmox backup server and then we can specify it as a data source so let's jump into the terminal now and do that so now that I'm logged into this virtual machine Let's get into it so the first thing we're going to want to do is to install C utils so the first thing we want to do is to install C utils so an AP install C utils remember we're already logged in as root so that's already installed next and like some of my previous videos before we can mount something we need to create a folder first for it to be mounted too so I'm going to create a directory in the/ MNT Mount and then call a directory so I'm going to create makeer make directory slash Mount and then I'm going to call this one tras so that's going to create that folder and now we're ready to add our SMB credentials to mount tras so I'm going to add an SMB credentials file and later we can reference that so choose your text editor of choice I prefer Nano and then we're going to do SLC SL Samba and then slash. SM SMB creds and then in here I'm going to specify a username and password now this is the username and password that you will already have assigned to your SMB share so put that one in here the format that you need to specify is the following and we'll reference these variables in a minute so now that's complete as a quick security step we can just change that file permission to be read only by root and to do that you just do a chod 400 these are additional steps but just good practice so now that we've done that we're ready to do the actual Mount command and if you've ever done this before in Linux it's pretty much identical so the command to do this is Mount and then sifts we want to pass it in the credentials that we used here so those were the ones we just created above and changed the permissions for the next part will be the IP address and the share name of your SMB share and then the last parameter is that folder we created just up here so with any look when I hit return this is going to mount my Nas to that folder so let's run it and let's go and validate that okay so ignoring the slash that I missed out on the First Command that looks like it's worked okay so I'm going to look in that folder now just to check that it's mounted okay so now I've created Ed this folder here so this test proxmox backup server for this video and you can see in here in my Windows Explorer that I've got my freeness address and I've also got this folder so we know now that this is mounted to the proxo backup server and hopefully I can start using this so how do we do that well let's head back into proxmox backup server and we're going to want to create a data store so now back in my new proxmox backup server I can hit add a data store now I'm just going to call this one test PBS just so it's different from my main one and then I need to choose a backing path now what's the backing path well it's where you're going to store this so remember we've mounted a folder to our proxmox backup server and that had the address of/ MNT traz SL test- PBS so that's okay now we might also want to look at the prune options so what are the prune options no it's not that sweet fruit it's how much data we want to retain so a bit like we did back in the restic video it's all about data retention so let's do something sensible like keep the last three we're going to keep the last one daily the last one monthly something like that have a read up in the documentation if you're not familiar with what this means but it's basically how many snapshots of varying time frequencies you want to keep so I'm going to click add now and that should now create a data store in that folder so let's now go and have a look in my Windows Explorer just to see if any folders have been created so yeah they have and you can see that there's a Dot Lock and a DOT chunks well the lock file is for locking access to the folder but also the chunks now the way d duplication works is it breaks down this storage space into chunks and when it does a backup it looks for differences in chunk size so you can actually tweak this to make it really small but it can have significant performance impact so I recommend leave it as default so what would happen is if it wrote for example in 10 megabyte blocks if the 10 megabytes were the same as before it' just make a reference that it was the same However if those 10 megabytes were different it would have to rewrite it and add it so depending on how much storage space you're going to give this it can take a long time so don't worry if it's sat there spinning it depends on how much storage space you've given it but just let it run and when it's finished we're on to the next step now if you want to you can click on the output Tab and it will show you the percentage it's got to so like I say it can take a while depending on how much Hardware you've got I.E CPU and also the speed of the drives it's storing it to okay okay so now that's completed and just for reference I think that took about 25 minutes on my machine now once that's completed you should be presented with this page if you're getting a permissions denied issue there's a fix for that and the fix is this back on the previous command you can see that I've amended it with a comma and then user ID of 34 and the group ID of 34 now that is the backup user by default for proxmox backup server so before if you got permission denied it's because that user didn't have access to it so now we've granted permission so if you're getting an error on screen come back and do this I'll drop this command into my GitHub now that we've mounted it and everything seems to be working in the background we want to make this persistent so we're going to add this command to our FS tab so the on boot each time this is loaded up and mounted so to do that use your text editor and open up FS Tab and you'll find that in ETC and then FS Tab and once you're in there we need to add a command to load this so we create a new line at the bottom and we want to copy and paste the following command it looks very similar to the previous Mount command and so the final command will look like this we specify the IP address and the mount we specify where we want to mount it to locally so that's Mount SL test PBS it's type sifts for SMB version three the same credentials and crucially we've still got the user ID and group ID and then some defaults and then 0 0 so once we've got that in place we can save it and now every time we reboot it should automatically Mount this so that that data store is up and available brilliant so let's get into how we use this now so back in PBS you can see that I've got my data store up here and running and and if we hop now back into proxmox so here we are back in proxmox and now if I go to the data center at the top we can add some storage and so to add the storage we click add and then proxmox backup server so the ID I'm just going to put this in as test- PBS the server is going to be the IP so 1 192168 7115 the username will be root at PBS and you can change this if you need to the password will be the password I specified within the installation the data store will be test- PBS and the important bit is to get the fingerprint now we need to go back to our PBS server to get the fingerprint so let's do that quickly now in PBS you want to go to configuration certificates and then you want to find the proxy pem and then click view certificate and here you'll get the fingerprint so we can just select this copy it and then we'll take this back to our proxmox server and we'll paste it into the field so now we're back here we can paste this in here and with any look we can click add and then we'll get it added to our proxmox server oops a quick error that should be Pam so now let's add it and there you go straight away we've got test PBS and that's now available and you can now see this over here on the left hand side and it's got all of the details available for that storage so now we can go to one of our dock VMS like this and we could do a backup and we can say backup now and instead of the storage being local we can do test PBS and we can now use this storage with the benefits of D duplication brilliant and moreover you could also do something like a scheduled backup so if you head into your data center and then you hit backup you can add a backup here and then you can select all of the virtual machines that you want to so again we'll change the storage to be the test which is our new one and then we can select a schedule so I don't know let's say we do this every day at 9:00 we can even send out emails if you've got SMTP set up which will be really useful because it will give you a alert as to whether it's completed successfully or whether there were issues so for this one I could click this virtual machine here and then I could click create you can could also repeat missed ones so if you've just missed it it'll go and do it so if I click create that's now going to do it and so on the 10th of the 11th that's going to run at 9:00 and it's going to back up to my traz courtesy of my proxmox virtual machine PBS now I could also add this to my other node and if I joined it into the proxmox cluster you'll see that this storage is available to both of those nodes I'll show you that in my production environment now so now back over in my production proxmox you can see I've got my Dell and my Asus and the proxmox backup server is here and is also down here so you can just use that for either of these nodes and after a while once you've got this storage backup in here I can actually then go and check in my PBS like I showed you at the beginning of the video you'll see all of those backups happening and in PBS where I am now you'll be able to click on the content and you'll be able to see all of the virtual machines that have been back back top and you can see each one of those backups now remember this is saying 20 gig for each one but if we check the actual summary we'll see the 6.12 so when I restore this it will come back as 20 gigs but actually those incremental snapshots they aren't 20 gigs is benefiting from a 6.12 times reduction in storage space so I hope you find that a useful demonstration of how you can improve your backup strategy specifically for prox MOX virtual machines let me know in the comments below if this is something that you're going to implement and hey why don't you tell me how much storage You' spaced just by doing this method so as always guys thanks for watching please give it a like please hit the Subscribe button and I'll see you on the next one take care [Music] everybody

Channel: Jim's Garage

Views: 14,049

Keywords: proxmox, proxmox backup server, proxmox guide, proxmox tutorial, proxmox setup, proxmox truenas, SMB, truenas, truenas share, install proxmox, proxmox nas, linux, homelab, virtual machine, nas, backup virtual machine, deduplication

Id: 84QZc5cnKZc

Length: 24min 47sec (1487 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2023