Advice on good remote targets?
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I have a server with a lot of storage but not a lot of compute. I had planned to use it for light VM work but also as a backup remote. I installed XCP-ng on it and have been playing with it but as I'm trying to figure out how to set up its large storage space as a remote target I'm finding that it seems XCP-ng isn't intended to directly act as a remote. It feels like I'd need to use something like TrueNAS to create NFS shares to store the backups. That means I'd either need to install it on bare metal and give up using the server as an XCP-ng host or I'd need to install it as a VM and be limited to attaching a bunch of 2TB max virtual disks and then share them via NFS.
Are there other good options? I was hoping this server could be a backup target and also be managed by XO for doing test restores or for non-production VMs for testing and whatnot so I don't like the idea of installing TrueNAS on it directly. I realize TrueNAS supports VMs but I'd rather not have to learn both XCP-ng/XO and TrueNAS for running VMs.
What is the general practice for creating backup remotes? Do they typically end up needing to run a different host OS or are they normally part of the XCP-ng ecosystem so they can be managed by XO?
I looked in the docs under backups and storage but I didn't see any guidance or advice about ways to set up on-site backup remotes. Apologies in advance if this is answered in the docs and I just missed it.
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Hi,
You shouldn't use the backup repository on the same machine than your XCP-ng host, because that's not a best practice (to say the least) to store the backup at the same place than the "production". So ideally, you should have a dedicated box (even a Raspi with an HDD) to serve as an NFS server for your backups.
If you really want to run everything on the same machine, you can create a big raw drive to get rid of the 2TiB limit for your TrueNAS VM. But again, storing backups on the same machine than your "production" is really not a good idea.
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if you have no any dedicated storage, it's possible to use literally any PC with nfs\smb\external drive, windows share also.
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@olivierlambert Sorry I didn't make this clear. I have multiple servers and one of them will not be used for production VMs. That's the server that happens to have a large amount of storage. I would not store backups on the same hardware as production work and this will not be my only backup of the production data. This server just has more storage than I have a use for so I thought it would be nice to use it for storing backups for the production servers since backups with history need a lot of space.
I do have an older server that I was considering using for backups but it just doesn't have nearly the storage as the one I'm talking about. 8TB as opposed to 90TB and it can't be easily expanded storage-wise. That one would be easier to convert to TrueNAS on bare metal.
It occurred to me last night that I could create 2TB drives for the XO VM on that server and backup to local storage in the VM. Actually one of my instances of XO is running on bare metal, instead of a VM, on that 8TB server so I could use that to backup to local storage if I didn't want to go with TrueNAS but TrueNAS has some other advantages, like providing an ISO share separate from my XCP-ng servers so it likely makes sense to go that route.
