16 thoughts on - Proxmox Backup Server Equivalent For The RHEL/CentOS World ?

• This is the greatest example to always decipher the abbreviations. PBS
  is quite well known for at least a couple of decades abbreviation standing for Portable Batch System. Proxmox on the other hand though seems to exist since 2008, I for one have never heard of – until this moment that is.

  (should I be adding “rant” rags?)

  Valeri

• Hi,

  That’s really a very interesting question. There are “Red Hat OpenStack Platform” and “Red Hat Virtualization” but I don’t know about their exact features and how they could be compared to the Proxmox products. From what I understand Proxmox is Open Source and can be used freely with the option to get paid support, is this correct?

  No but I’m also listening to hear options.

  Regards, Simon

• Le 12/04/2021 à 18:28, Simon Matter a écrit :

  Yes, it’s an extremely nice hypervisor solution with an intuitive GUI. You can use the community repos freely (they work perfectly) but you need a subscription to use their enterprise repo, a bit like OwnCloud for example.

  After fiddling with it for a couple weeks, I must say I’m impressed. Documentation is also nice, and the user forum is very reactive.

  The same thing on RHEL compatible systems would be just perfect.

  Niki

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• Once upon a time, Nicolas Kovacs said:

  I believe Red Hat Virtualization, and its open upstream oVirt, are comparable to Proxmox. I have used oVirt for a number of years. oVirt itself doesn’t include backup software (it supports VM snapshots and clones), but there are several third-party backup tools (both free and commercial) compatible with oVirt/RHV, like Storeware’s vProtect (I
  haven’t used it but seen others mention it).

• Le 12/04/2021 à 23:11, Chris Adams a écrit :

  I’d be very grateful for some links to these third-party backup tools, with a preference for free (as in beer + speech) stuff.

  Niki

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• Once upon a time, Nicolas Kovacs said:

  Google is your friend – check out the ovirt-users mailing list archive. I’m not doing VM-based backups (had system backups already before setting up this VM environment and haven’t had the opportunity to change), so I can’t really say.

  I know there are people using Ansible plays against the oVirt API to do things, so there are probably scripts for that in the usual places like github.

• No, it isn’t. Duckduckgo is ;-)

  Valeri

  – check out the ovirt-users mailing list archive.

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
  Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

• I haven’t followed oVirt/RHV but I’m wondering how free it is? Is it as
  “free” as RHEL or as CentOS/Alma/Rocky/Navy/Oracle Linux?

  BTW, from what I know Proxmox does make use of ZFS for some nice features, does oVirt/RHV have some comparable solutions?

  Thanks, Simon

• Upstream -> Product

  Fedora -> RHEL
  oVirt -> RHV

• Thanks for the confirmation.

  In other words, we’ll soon have four or more almost 100% identical rebuilds of RHEL but only 1 very lacking EPEL and 0 RHV clones ;-)

  Regards, Simon

• Those all depend on committed volunteers to do the work. That takes up a lot of time and effort from people who are in short supply because doing those things are more like a job than a ‘weekend fun project’. This would normally be where people would pay for a product but there are not a lot of paying customers and a larger number of people who either expect it there or would rather go without than pay for it.

• Once upon a time, Simon Matter said:

  oVirt is the upstream for RHV. Development takes place in oVirt, but
  (to me anyway) like Fedora, that doesn’t mean it is an unfinished or beta product – they do development and have test releases and such. But, like any freely-available software, sometimes you get to find new ways to break it (and then go hunting for help on mailing lists and such). :) I’ve run oVirt in production for over 6 years (don’t actually remember exactly when I started but at least that long).

  All of my oVirt experience has been with external iSCSI storage arrays –
  my main cluster was a mail server farm for 60K residential users, so we needed TBs of fast storage. oVirt supports a hyperconverged setup with Gluster as well; I set it up once in a lab, but we didn’t end up using it (so I can’t offer any experience with it).

  We used to have a TrueNAS (commercial FreeBSD+ZFS storage array), and… we had issues with it. I was not a fan and probably would avoid ZFS and FreeNAS/TrueNAS based on my experiences (but maybe they’ve gotten better). We hit multiple bugs with it that took a long time to resolve. We were also unhappy with the hardware and its support from iX Systems
  (the company behind FreeNAS/TrueNAS).

  Aside from bugs, one drawback of ZFS for me was that, when we needed more storage and added more drives, there was no way to rebalance the space. We ended up getting “hot spots” because a flood of data was written to just the new drives. The ZFS “solution” is just to backup and restore your data (which is not an enterprise or highly available option to me).

  Rebalance is hard, but I ran DEC Unix back in the day, and their AdvFS
  not only supported rebalance, it ran it regularly from a cron job (which may have been a hack around the kernel not balancing well to begin with of course).

• Hello

  As I said a couple of weeks ago in response to Niki I have been using ProxMox almost from the beginning ;). No “enterprise” version. And backup is one of the reasons for that. NFS on NAS as a backup target is really nice, even one time quicker than backup to local storage (NAS with 10gb FC).

  Also fiddling with RHV. But there is no “free” backup solution. I am trying with Bacchus but no way to schedule backup. Single backup OK, schedule backup no go. So now use vProtect, for 5 years not a lot of $.

  But I hope to find some instructions on how to build Prox and use it as software defined storage. I must learn how to build this, especially about a separated management network, without I think I can’t build this to get HA. And them migrate from RHV.

  All the best Blaz

• Hallo Niki,

  you may take a look at _rear_ (it is that easy how it looks like)

  https://relax-and-recover.org/ <https://relax-and-recover.org/>

  and a possible integration of rear with bareos:

  https://docs.bareos.org/IntroductionAndTutorial/WhatIsBareos.html
  <https://docs.bareos.org/IntroductionAndTutorial/WhatIsBareos.html>

  Both solutions come up with support if necessary, while community is really responsive.

  Regards,

  Felix

• You may also want to check mondo:

  http://www.mondorescue.org/about.shtml (the website is not updated
  regularly!)

  I am using it for many years, since CentOS 5 (until now with CentOS 8).

  There may be a few glitches, but otherwise I am pretty satisfied.

  It supports bare metal recovery and can be used for cloning too.

  Cheers, Nick

• Il 2021-04-16 14:35 Nikolaos Milas ha scritto:

  Hi, while relax-and-recover, mondorescue and similar tools have their place, I mostly find them outdated for VM backup. The main reason is that they have difficult providing low RTO and RPO.

  For my current low-cost linux hypervisors I use a ZFS filesystem, with backups done leaveraing a mix of both ZFS send/recv and rsnapshot. More specifically:
  – rolling hourly snapshots are taked via sanoid;
  – the primary datastore (with raw disk images) is replicated with 1min interval (thanks to send/recv) to a second, standby server. This guarantee a byte-for-byte copy of all the virtual machines backing files
  *and* the capability to quickly restart all VMs in case the first server dies;
  – a third machine does rsnapshot-based backup of the data inside the VMs themselves, for added convenience in recovering a single file and for longer historical retention.

  This backup scheme as served me very well. Just my 2c. Regards.

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