[PVE] Poor man's "Surebackup" with Instant Recovery to Nested ESXi?

[JulianBlue]

Has anyone tried using a Nested ESXi 8x Virtual Appliance to verify the backup of Proxmox VMs with Instant Recovery?

[Mildur]

Hi JulianBlue,

Theoretically, it can work, as long as your nested ESXi server is properly licensed. Without an ESXi license, some necessary vSphere APIs may be missing. Also, keep in mind that you shouldn’t expect the same performance as on a native ESXi machine.

What’s the use case for running a nested ESXi on Proxmox? What types of workloads do you want to use SureBackup jobs for?

Best,
Fabian

[JulianBlue]

Hi Fabian,
We are waiting for native Proxmox Instant Recovery and native Proxmox SureBackup.
In the meantime, I would like to verify the backups of production VM made with Veeam for Proxmox.

[Mildur]

Hi Julian,

Yes, that can work. Some people have managed to get Nested ESXi running on Proxmox – see this external blog (not related to Veeam).

However, as I mentioned, you will need to license the ESXi host, otherwise Instant Recovery will likely fail due to missing APIs. You can try it without a license first, the Instant Recovery Session should show you an error message.

Best,
Fabian