Book Image

Mastering Proxmox - Second Edition

By : Wasim Ahmed
Book Image

Mastering Proxmox - Second Edition

By: Wasim Ahmed

Overview of this book

Proxmox is an open source server virtualization solution that has enterprise-class features to manage virtual machines, to be used for storage, and to virtualize both Linux and Windows application workloads. You begin with refresher on the advanced installation features and the Proxmox GUI to familiarize yourself with the Proxmox VE hypervisor. You then move on to explore Proxmox under the hood, focusing on the storage systems used with Proxmox. Moving on, you will learn to manage KVM Virtual Machines and Linux Containers and see how networking is handled in Proxmox. You will then learn how to protect a cluster or a VM with a firewall and explore the new HA features introduced in Proxmox VE 4 along with the brand new HA simulator. Next, you will dive deeper into the backup/restore strategy followed by learning how to properly update and upgrade a Proxmox node. Later, you will learn how to monitor a Proxmox cluster and all of its components using Zabbix. By the end of the book, you will become an expert at making Proxmox environments work in production environments with minimum downtime.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Mastering Proxmox - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Proxmox backup options


As of Proxmox VE 4.1, there are two backup options included out of the box:

  • Full backup: This backs up the entire virtual machine

  • Snapshots: This freezes the state of a VM at a point in time

Proxmox 4.1 can only do a full backup and cannot do any granular file backup from inside a virtual machine. Proxmox also does not use any backup agent.

A full backup

A full backup is a complete compressed backup of a virtual machine, including its configuration file. We can take this backup and restore it locally to the same cluster or to an entirely different Proxmox cluster. We can potentially set up a full backup everyday or on a different schedule up to one week. Since a full backup commits the complete backup of the entire virtual machine, including all the virtual disk images in it, it is the slowest backup option. It is also the safest since the final backup file is not dependent on the original VM. Two of the most important components of a full backup are backup modes and...