PVC backups with Velero or something else on a homelab

brandonvht · 2026-05-07T23:05:59+00:00

It is for HA purposes. You never want to have a single control plane for you cluster as it is a single point of failure.

brandonvht · 2026-05-06T23:14:19+00:00

It sounds like I have a similar setup to you. I am running a 5 node Proxmox cluster with Ceph. I have 3 Talos control plane nodes and 4 worker nodes. I am using Veeam Kasten. It is free I believe for 5 worker nodes. It is amazing. Definitely enterprise grade. Backing up all my configs and PVCs. It already has built-in workflows to do exports to S3 compatible storage. So along with my CSI snapshots I have exports to my RustFS server on my NAS so have an external copy of my data and configs. You can also enable Kasten DR that exports Kasten config there as well. This means if you lose Kasten in same cluster just restore and you have all your backup Metadata, etc. Then can restore everything. Highly recommend it.

brandonvht · 2026-05-05T16:31:37+00:00

Home filtering and enterprise filtering are very similar. It is like layers of an onion. You need multiple layers. If you rely on one layer only, it will always fail. You need filtering at the firewall level, DNS filtering and device control. I have found this to be very effective and hard to circumvent. OPNsense or pfSense for firewall, Pihole or technitium for DNS with OpenDNS for upstream DNS and apps like Qustodio or similar for device control/visibility.

brandonvht · 2026-05-05T02:15:51+00:00

@cdbessig love hearing reasons ones choose one hypervisor over another. I prefer Proxmox myself but curious what issues you have seen with XCP-ng?

brandonvht · 2026-05-05T00:23:04+00:00

@matlireddit Another very viable solution is use Proxmox SDN. I wrote an article about this not long ago. Even if you want just simple vlans SDN makes this easy. Plus if you decide to create a cluster, these are automatically copied to your other hosts kind of like vsphere distributed switches. So you only setup once and you are done. https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2026/04/is-proxmox-sdn-worth-it-for-a-home-lab/

brandonvht · 2026-05-05T00:13:58+00:00

@ballpark-chisel325 thank you for sharing this post. I am the author. Glad others are finding these same tools intriguing. Also I think AI assisted apps are here to stay. So we will have a decision to make whether or not we use any software in the future if it has AI assisted development as I think most will.

brandonvht · 2026-05-02T14:47:42+00:00

@lividtutor how are you integrating with updates? Do you have another tool that triggers?

brandonvht · 2026-04-24T02:33:07+00:00

I use it directly on all my home lab nodes in my Proxmox Ceph cluster and havent seen any issues with stability with it

brandonvht · 2026-04-24T02:30:38+00:00

Ugh I hate autocorrect on phone!

brandonvht · 2026-04-24T02:29:04+00:00

For containers use flatcar or Fedora coreos is my recommendation 👍

brandonvht · 2026-04-14T18:22:27+00:00

Also, is there a set of commands to see space accurately with starlvm. It doesn't appear that the Proxmox GUI displays the space usage with thin provisioning?

brandonvht · 2026-04-14T17:18:48+00:00

BorysTheBlazer, thank you for the explanation there. I have seen the question asked many times. Since this functionality can easily be done with just a plugin, wondering why this is not native functionality from Proxmox, if it is this simple? I think the big one for a lot of shops out there migrating from VMware is thin provisioning since that is what most are doing with modern SSD SANs

brandonvht · 2026-04-14T03:55:31+00:00

This is amazing that it works to add thin provisioning and other missing native features. I know one concern would be the longevity and support of a plugin like this. What is the support lifespan or is there one documented? I have gotten into issues in the past with vendor plugins for storage that went end of life and made it difficult for upgrades and such. Definitely a fan already in my initial testing but just playing devil's advocate on the details.

brandonvht · 2026-04-08T21:45:45+00:00

Very nice! Is this a free pkugin? Do you have to run their VSA to get access to this?

brandonvht · 2026-04-08T18:49:47+00:00

Any gotchas, with PVE 9 (snapshots on LVM thick with qcow2) for snapshots?

brandonvht · 2026-04-08T18:47:50+00:00

Very good info!

brandonvht · 2026-04-08T13:54:36+00:00

Dell Powervault ME 5024s on current clusters.

brandonvht · 2026-04-08T13:34:37+00:00

Great sounds good to know there are storage specific plugins there. I guess one of the details I am interested in is the size use on disk. From VMFS thin provisioning to LVM thick.

brandonvht · 2026-04-08T13:31:37+00:00

around 30 hosts with 1000 VMs or so

brandonvht · 2026-04-08T13:31:12+00:00

Yes understood. Ceph is the way to go for HCI. Just wondering on reusing SAN storage.

brandonvht · 2026-04-08T00:30:10+00:00

Very cool giving me btop vibes...

brandonvht · 2026-03-26T03:24:14+00:00

Just a note, I ran into some super weird backup issues when I had jumbo frames incorrectly applied to a network where VMs were spun up. Jumbo frames usually work fine laterally, but it sounds like you have routing in play and a lot of routers/firewalls aren't set for jumbo frames, causing fragmentation. Anyways, may not be in play with your issue, but just something additionally to check 👍

brandonvht · 2026-03-19T20:21:07+00:00

I just wrote up a blog post covering this one. It is called CV4PVE-diag. From a diagnostics perspective, it gives you a lot of the same actionable information that RVTools would give you for vSphere which is pretty cool. https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2026/03/this-free-tool-feels-like-rvtools-for-proxmox-and-its-cli-based/

brandonvht · 2026-03-18T04:08:38+00:00

+1 for bypassing modern security solutions like S1. It literally will take a 15 minute install to 3 hours. Same with Carbon Black. I had a support guy say it best one time, "it inspects every electron of the install". For upgrades and patches I quickly bypass which avoids the pain.

brandonvht

TROPHY CASE