Proxmox Enterprise Bacula Plugin Quick Guide

This Quick Guide presents Enterprise Bacula Proxmox VM Backup Plugin usage techniques and strategies.

The Plugin provides automatic complete virtual machines backup and recovery, including QEMU and LXC guests and other features, as detailed:

Snapshot-based online backup of any guest VM including QEMU and LXC
guests
Full image-level backup
Automatic VMs configuration backup
Ability to restore complete virtual machine image
Backups can be performed for guests VMs in any power state (running or stopped)
Deduplicated backups with Bacula Deduplication Drivers
Ability to restore QEMU VM archive (.vma) to an alternate directory
Ability to restore LXC VM archive (.tar) and configuration to an alternate
directory

One of the Plugin advantages is that Bacula doesn’t need to walk through the Client filesystem to open/read/close/stat files, so it consumes fewer resources on your Proxmox infrastructure than a file level traditional backup on each guest machine would.

Installation

The Proxmox Plugin must be installed on the Proxmox hypervisor machine which hosts your virtual guests VMs that you want to backup, and where a Bacula File Daemon (client) is already installed and configured.

You can install the Enterprise Bacula Proxmox Plugin by extending the repository file for your package manager to contain a section for the plugin. For example, in Debian /etc/apt/sources.list.d/bacula.list, replacing the customer code, Debian and Enterprise Bacula desired versions:

# Debian Bacula Enterprise
deb https://www.baculasystems.com/dl/@customer-string@/debs/bin/10.0.2/stretch-64/ stretch main
deb https://www.baculasystems.com/dl/@customer-string@/debs/proxmox/10.0.2/stretch-64/ stretch proxmox

Update apt and install the package:

apt-get update && apt-get install bacula-enterprise-proxmox-plugin

If you prefer to manually install the packages, you can also download them from your download area and use dpkg to perform the plugin installation. E.g.

dpkg -i bacula-enterprise-proxmox-plugin_10.0.2-1_amd64.deb

Restart the Bacula Client in order to load the plugin:

service bacula-fd restart

Configuration

As shown in Figure 1, use bweb Bacula Configuration module to create a new FileSet. Edit its Include Plugin Options. The simple “proxmox:” specification enables all Client Virtual Machines backup.