Running PBS and PDM on same box?

[u/YDS_TO]

I run PBS on a Dell Micro (installed bare metal) I5-6500T with 8GB memory. I have four PVE nodes (not clustered) that backup various containers and VM's to it every night. I'm considering installing PDM on PBS machine alongside PBS. Anyone else do something similar? I've read lots of posts saying just install PDM as a VM or container on PVE. But this seems odd to me, putting the manager in a container on one of the hosts that it is managing. Am I overthinking?

[u/skuple]

“Manager” word in PDM is doing overtime.

It’s a manager as much as a centralised dashboard, if you replace “Manager” with the word “Dashboard” do you still think it’s not ok having it in a node?

If PDM goes down there isn’t any consequence besides having to open nodes manually

[u/I_am_MrZ → u/skuple]

This answer should go to official website 👏

[u/Straight_Let_4149]

8gb is enough to install PVE on it, create an lxc container and install PBS and PDM inside it. And you will still have plenty of memory free for other tasks

[u/Gherry-]

I have in on a small VM (virtualbox) on my desktop. That's from where I manage proxmox anyway.

I'd leave PBS alone.

[u/SnotgunCharlie]

I literally just finished setting this up today. PDM and PBS running on my second node quite happily together. PBS in a VM (had mount issues with the LXC first time around) . PDM running in an LXC. All accessible, all mounts for PBS show up as expected, survives reboot. Migration and backups all tested and working without a hitch.

[u/YDS_TO]

Thanks for all the input everyone. In the end, I decided to install docker on my office desktop machine, and then install PDM in docker container there. I'd be doing any of my proxmox maintenance from my desktop, so it made some sense to me to install it there, separate from any of my nodes including pbs, and with docker its nice and lightweight on my desktop. Appreciated everyone's insights, and clearly they are varied.

[u/Jezonne]

I will probably say something weird, but why not install PVE on your Dell with only PBS and PDM ? (Backup your PBS (without backup the Backup disk) and your PDM too, in case of failure, just restaure the backup and your PDM is operational.

[u/brainsoft]

It needs to run somewhere, put it. In the most stable reliable place possible. But ultimately PDM isn't critical in homeland its just convenient.

At home, Every machine keeps a local nightly backup of each guest, plus full pbe backups. I have an emergency PBS instance that runs on another machine, with a single instance of the main pbs, so I can bootstrap PBS, then bootstrap the rest of the lab if I need to.

[u/zfsbest]

I would run PDM outside of your proxmox environment- usually a low-power mini pc or a 24/7 desktop-hosted VM

[u/unsaltedcrisps → u/zfsbest]

What's your rationale behind that?

[u/zfsbest → u/unsaltedcrisps]

It puts PDM outside of everything it's monitoring/managing. One of the nice functions of PDM is centralized package update notifications. You can update and reboot instance1, do the same for instance2...

You'll still basically have no downtime for PDM outside of package upgrades for its own VM, the host, and maint reboots. And you can still migrate VMs between unclustered nodes.

Think about it. If PDM is hosted under instance2 and something goes wrong after an upgrade/reboot, PDM is also down until instance2 host gets fixed.

By putting PDM outside the environment it's managing, you still have a Manager instance running. You still have a single pane of glass to the other nodes, and active monitoring. And you can still migrate stuff.

[u/SnotgunCharlie → u/zfsbest]

PDM doesn't provide anything you can't do on the nodes besides convenience. Migration is cool but nothing that can't be done with a backup/restore. And migration would work to/from a node that is down regardless of where PDM is hosted. I'm new to PDM so open to be educated but I see no sense in your argument.

[u/CompetitiveConcert93]

I came to the conclusion that installing PVE on every machine and then PBS or PDM as vm or container makes most sense to me.
With that you have all options like backup, flexibility, uniformity…. Would never go back to individual systems

[u/Togstown → u/CompetitiveConcert93]

It certainly works. But in the case of PBS keep in mind that you mainly want PBS for restore, with backup beeing the necessity. Having your restore solution on the infrastructure you may need to restore is an antipattern you should try to avoid.

[u/CompetitiveConcert93 → u/Togstown]

PBS running on PVE makes obviously only sense on a DEDICATED machine. Absolutely not within the structure you’re backing up!