Reconsidering ProxMox
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@VoIP_n00b said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
You definitely can. We use that as the backing to our main backup tools on LVM.
Then your using LVM-thin. Maybe that's just a subset of LVM?
LVM-thin is just LVM with the -t flag set when created. They are both equally LVM. It's general practice to use thin provisioning by default and only vary when you have a specific workload that specifically benefits from being thick. Which for us is few and far between for sure. Those workloads exist, but they basically require special underlying hardware as well, like dedicated NVMe. So nothing exotic, but not general purpose, either.
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@VoIP_n00b said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
You definitely can. We use that as the backing to our main backup tools on LVM.
Then your using LVM-thin. Maybe that's just a subset of LVM?
You can snapshot thick provisioned volumes also.
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@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
We do, shouldn't, but we do because customers don't want to pay for better backups.
I am surprised NTG would take on a client like this. We sure wouldn't. The risk is too great. We just tell the client to take there business elsewhere. Maybe we are sending clients to you guys! =P
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@stacksofplates said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@VoIP_n00b said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
You definitely can. We use that as the backing to our main backup tools on LVM.
Then your using LVM-thin. Maybe that's just a subset of LVM?
You can snapshot thick provisioned volumes also.
Yeah, just for some reason in that table it shows that you can't. My guess is that it is a typo, but I've not tested it so I can't confirm.
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@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@stacksofplates said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@VoIP_n00b said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
You definitely can. We use that as the backing to our main backup tools on LVM.
Then your using LVM-thin. Maybe that's just a subset of LVM?
You can snapshot thick provisioned volumes also.
Yeah, just for some reason in that table it shows that you can't. My guess is that it is a typo, but I've not tested it so I can't confirm.
It's been a few years since I've done that. But I'm pretty sure you can (on normal systems I have no idea with ProxMox).
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@VoIP_n00b said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
We do, shouldn't, but we do because customers don't want to pay for better backups.
I am surprised NTG would take on a client like this. We sure wouldn't. The risk is too great. We just tell the client to take there business elsewhere. Maybe we am sending clients to you guys! =P
So your reaction to thinking I didn't do snapshots was meant to mean that you were impressed? I feel like you are flipping back and forth.
At first you acted like I was crazy for not doing snapshots. Then when you found out I do use them, you act like MSPs shouldn't take on any client that uses traditional backup software - which all use snapshots.
Are you truly telling me you don't have a single customer that demands you use regular backup software? And that you don't have them because you turn them down? Absolutely send them my way.
My job is to take care of the customer and give good advice. In no way is it my concern if they listen to that advice. I work in IT, I'm not an investor. Only an investor would care about that. I absolutely want those customers that demand we use Veeam or whatever.
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@stacksofplates said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@stacksofplates said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@VoIP_n00b said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
You definitely can. We use that as the backing to our main backup tools on LVM.
Then your using LVM-thin. Maybe that's just a subset of LVM?
You can snapshot thick provisioned volumes also.
Yeah, just for some reason in that table it shows that you can't. My guess is that it is a typo, but I've not tested it so I can't confirm.
It's been a few years since I've done that. But I'm pretty sure you can (on normal systems I have no idea with ProxMox).
Oh I KNOW it works outside of Proxmox. The question here is if Proxmox has a button to push to make it happen in their interface.
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@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
Yeah, just for some reason in that table it shows that you can't. My guess is that it is a typo, but I've not tested it so I can't confirm.
It's defiantly not a typo. I am the member of a proxmox user group, and someone just did a install with LVM and everything related to snapshots was grayed out. Then we figured out it was LVM and not LVM-thin. So regardless if it's "all the same" it matters to proxmox.
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@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
We do, shouldn't, but we do because customers don't want to pay for better backups.
I was referring to this ^ Snapshots are not a backup, just like RAID is not a backup.
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@VoIP_n00b said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
Yeah, just for some reason in that table it shows that you can't. My guess is that it is a typo, but I've not tested it so I can't confirm.
It's defiantly not a typo. I am the member of a proxmox user group, and someone just did a install with LVM and everything related to snapshots was grayed out. Then we figured out it was LVM and not LVM-thin. So regardless if it's "all the same" it matters to proxmox.
Why is each VM getting a volume? Just use qcow2 files. I don't get the point to doing it that way.
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@VoIP_n00b said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
We do, shouldn't, but we do because customers don't want to pay for better backups.
I was referring to this ^ Snapshots are not a backup, just like RAID is not a backup.
If I snapshot a VM and copy the snapshot off somewhere else it's a backup.
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@VoIP_n00b said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
LVM is what we use.
So you don't take snapshots?
Proxmox by default is using LVM thin which is awesome because when you snapshot it’s smaller.
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@stacksofplates said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
If I snapshot a VM and copy the snapshot off somewhere else it's a backup.
Sure, agreed. But that's not what @scottalanmiller said.
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@VoIP_n00b said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
We do, shouldn't, but we do because customers don't want to pay for better backups.
I was referring to this ^ Snapshots are not a backup, just like RAID is not a backup.
Except that's not what you said. That's correct and good thinking, but you said this in response to be discussing snapshots as a mechanism for backups, which is how Proxmox (and everyone else) uses them. That's why you take snapshots primarily.
No one was talking about snapshots AS a backup, but snapshot capability being required for Proxmox to make backups (or other tools to do so.)
Snapshots are not a backup. I didn't say the customers didn't have backups, I said that they used snapshots to make their backups... as that's what everyone does almost. Most people swear by it. Hypervisor level backups are always snapshot based, and almost all non-hypervisor agent based backups are as well, but not 100%. Windows backup is, however.
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@VoIP_n00b said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
Yeah, just for some reason in that table it shows that you can't. My guess is that it is a typo, but I've not tested it so I can't confirm.
It's defiantly not a typo. I am the member of a proxmox user group, and someone just did a install with LVM and everything related to snapshots was grayed out. Then we figured out it was LVM and not LVM-thin. So regardless if it's "all the same" it matters to proxmox.
Well that sucks. But why were they deploying LVM rather than LVM-thin?
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@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@biggen said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller What’s your storage configuration like?
I’ve been playing with it on ZFS Raid 1 mirror. Proxmox OS and VMs all on same mirror. Performance is “OK”. Not as good as MD with same setup though.
Wonder if it’s better to create separate Raid 1 ZFS pools. One for the Proxmox OS and one for the VMs.
We don't use ZFS - slow and we don't want its features (few actually do.) LVM is what we use. What is making you want to look at ZFS? It's not meant for speed and has little generally purpose these days. It's not bad, but mostly it's deployed by accident when people aren't sure what it is. Then people swear by "features" that everything has thinking they are unique to ZFS.
ZFS is a great system, with niche applicability.
I wanted to just mirror a SSD pair but thought the only way to "officially" to that with Proxmox was ZFS since they don't support MD.
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@VoIP_n00b said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@stacksofplates said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
If I snapshot a VM and copy the snapshot off somewhere else it's a backup.
Sure, agreed. But that's not what @scottalanmiller said.
It's exactly what I said, because I was discussing backups. I shouldn't have to explain to someone what a backup is every time. Your logic seems to be that because I said "backup", but didn't explain it to you like you were totally clueless, that I must not have meant backup because I should have assumed that you didn't know what backups were?
That makes no sense.
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After all of this, I still don't get the use case for LVM backed VMs. Other than possibly, possibly a super IO heavy database. Even then, it's questionable.
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@biggen said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@biggen said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
@scottalanmiller What’s your storage configuration like?
I’ve been playing with it on ZFS Raid 1 mirror. Proxmox OS and VMs all on same mirror. Performance is “OK”. Not as good as MD with same setup though.
Wonder if it’s better to create separate Raid 1 ZFS pools. One for the Proxmox OS and one for the VMs.
We don't use ZFS - slow and we don't want its features (few actually do.) LVM is what we use. What is making you want to look at ZFS? It's not meant for speed and has little generally purpose these days. It's not bad, but mostly it's deployed by accident when people aren't sure what it is. Then people swear by "features" that everything has thinking they are unique to ZFS.
ZFS is a great system, with niche applicability.
I wanted to just mirror a SSD pair but thought the only way to "officially" to that with Proxmox was ZFS since they don't support MD.
Ah okay. That makes sense. In that case, you are free to disable all that ZFS stuff that causes problems and just treat it like any normal system. Then it won't use all that bloated RAM.
But that's really good to note that MD isn't officially supported by the Proxmox layer. Not a big deal, as it is just Debian under there and it is officially supported by Debian. So you can use it and Proxmox doesn't care. But if you are paying for support, you'd definitely want to stick to ZFS RAID so that you have a throat to choke under contract.
I think either way is fine, just be aware that ZFS requires a lot more manual work from you to get running well. But if you are going to set up MD manually, it might be still easier to let PM manage ZFS and just tune it by hand, rather than installing and setting up MD by hand.
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@stacksofplates said in Reconsidering ProxMox:
After all of this, I still don't get the use case for LVM backed VMs. Other than possibly, possibly a super IO heavy database. Even then, it's questionable.
That's roughly it, and yes, it remains questionable at the best of times.
In the cases where you need LVM fat, you almost certainly also need to avoid LVM because that itty bitty overhead is still too much.
