Book Image

Mastering Proxmox - Third Edition

By : Wasim Ahmed
4 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Proxmox - Third Edition

4 (1)
By: Wasim Ahmed

Overview of this book

Proxmox is an open source server virtualization solution that has enterprise-class features for managing virtual machines, for storage, and to virtualize both Linux and Windows application workloads. You'll begin with a refresher on the advanced installation features and the Proxmox GUI to familiarize yourself with the Proxmox VE hypervisor. Then, you'll move on to explore Proxmox under the hood, focusing on storage systems, such as Ceph, used with Proxmox. Moving on, you'll learn to manage KVM virtual machines, deploy Linux containers fast, and see how networking is handled in Proxmox. You'll also learn how to protect a cluster or a VM with a firewall and explore the new high availability features introduced in Proxmox VE 5.0. Next, you'll dive deeper into the backup/restore strategy and see how to properly update and upgrade a Proxmox node. Later, you'll learn how to monitor a Proxmox cluster and all of its components using Zabbix. Finally, you'll discover how to recover Promox from disaster strikes through some real-world examples. By the end of the book, you'll be an expert at making Proxmox work in production environments with minimal downtime.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Proxmox backup options


As of Proxmox VE 5.0, 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 5.0 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 agents for guest VMs.

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 every day, or on a different schedule of 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...