BlueByte

I am wanting to quickly check my backups from the VM backup plugin. I have 2 VMs hosted on a unraid system that are backed up nightly to a NAS and then kicked off site and a USB HDD that is swapped out daily. The backups work well but testing the backups have been kind of tedious. I was playing with virtualbox running a unraid VM with nested VM turned on. I was thinking I could quickly dump the vm img file onto that VM boot it up and check that my backup is good. I was not expecting the same performance as my production environment, but it is incredibly slow. Before I abandon this test environment is there a nested VM setup that people have found to be more successful. My desktop that I am testing with is windows 11 with a 5900X currently with 32GB of ram. Currently have VirtualBox but I am not attached to it, just looking for quick and dirty test data and get out.

I have recently tested and played enough with the VM backup utility that I am happy with the scheduled backup we have every night. We are backing up 3 VMs. The file sizes of 2 of the VMs make perfect sense with the compression. The database VM is compressing quite large, almost the full allocated disk size. The database is ~100GB on a dedicated img file, no other programs/data are located on it. It is provisioned to be 250GB. Currently the nightly img compressed file is sitting at ~220GB. Are there any img utilities built into unraid, or things I can do within the VM OS to improve this(ie defrag)? We have multiple levels of backup happening outside of unraid, this is extra level of backup we can run at night that gives us some extra convenience if things go downhill. I know the VM backup utility is a beta software.

I am doing some testing with 2 UNRAID servers and a VM. We have a clunky database software that we can not take a real time snapshot of natively. In my testing I have a VM with 2 extra virtual drives, 1 of them is located on the NFS share. A software RAID between the 2 VM drives through a dedicated 10G network(if testing will upgrade to a infiniband). I know this is not how it should be done ideally, but the software is a PITA. The goal of all this, is if one server goes down I can boot up a backup VM referencing the database VM drive quickly. We have offsite backups, and nightly snapshots as far as real backups go. So far testing of the database is working great. The downside is if I try to break it, it breaks hard. If main server goes down, the VM drive on the secondary works fine, I can reference it no problem. If I take down the secondary server the main server becomes unresponsive I think because of the lost NFS drive. If I try to unmount it, it fails. If I try to reboot the main server it will not reboot, the web interface still works but ignores any request/command you type in. Basically if the backup server goes down it takes the main server with it. Is there a FAQ, or guide for this type of use case. Something I can do/implement to fortify the main server in the case of the secondary server dropping? Is there a unraid setup for replication across 2 servers that would support VMs?