[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

[damiengm]

Hi Julian,
Could you expand a bit more on your idea/workflow? We are moving away from VMware so the lack of SureBackup currently with Proxmox is a concern, so is your idea to use Instant Recovery to restore the PVE VM backup to the nested ESXi (isolated from prod of course), and once its up go into it and run a few tests? I gather this would be slower than a normal SureBackup as it has to translate some of the PVE stuff to ESXi stuff and you don't get all the automation of build up/pull down of the VM. If this is working for you then I will have to consider leaving one of my ESXi servers around to perform such a task until SureBackup comes to Proxmox.
Regards
Damien

[Mildur]

Hi Damien

He is talking about Manual Recovery Verification.

You can start Instant Recovery for any of your machine backups on an ESXi host. Then, connect the machines to an isolated network. Next, connect to the VMs through the ESXi console and perform your manual tests on the virtual machines. What test you want to run depends on the applications on your machine.

Best,
Fabian