I recently had a hard drive failure while transitioning to an aufs/snapraid configuration using OMV on my Proxmox box.  I ended up losing about 3TB of data, of which 800GB was not backed up on another device in my network. Ouch.  Fortunately I had Crashplan Pro running for the past few years and backing up everything.

I first started using the Crashplan Restore option in my Windows 8 box but was constrained to having it run at between 6 – 10 mbps, which was estimated to take over a week to restore all of the data. I spoke with Crashplan support and they said this was normal as I was sharing the line and resources with other users.  Fine, I thought, but I don’t want to keep my primary Windows computer on for days on end when I could just setup one of my VMs on my headless server to do the work.  I had left it running for a few days already but only received about 200GB of data.

Surprisingly when I setup my OMV box to use Crashplan’s GUI by installing LXDE and the Crashplan application my download speeds skyrocketed to saturate my entire 50mbps line! I was surprised to see over 500GB downloaded in a single day through my OMV box.  I thought I would share this for those who might be restoring a huge quantity of data but complain about slow speeds on their Windows box.  I wasn’t able to resume the existing progress from my Windows box — so I ended up overwriting the 200GB that Crashplan had already downloaded in Window — but the speed more than made up for it.

I dedicated 3 CPUs and 8GB of RAM to my OMV box while it’s doing this and it’s eating up about 30-50% of my CPU while it does this.  Not too shabby!

For more information on restoring from Crashplan Pro — a service which I highly recommend — is here: https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/Latest/Restoring/Restoring_Files_From_The_CrashPlan_App

Here is OMV (Open Media Vault) information main page: http://www.openmediavault.org/

I’ve been tinkering with Proxmox VE for holding my Linux NAS and media file server (OpenMediaVault [OMV]) in addition to some other Linux containers.  As OMV would be the only VM to access some of these disks I scoured the web for how to add a physical disk to a VM (http://forum.proxmox.com/archive/index.php/t-6192.html).

The problem with using /dev/sdX to pass through is that oftentimes the hard drives will change their X value (sometimes my primary will be on /dev/sda and othertimes /dev/sdg).  I couldn’t find an easy way to point it to the disk itself rather than its symbolic link that didn’t involve messing with udev & udevadm in the Proxmox forums or documentation, but I did discover that you can point QM (in the vm.conf file such as 101.conf, 102.conf, etc.).

Basically, do this in the Proxmox Console or an SSH session:

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id

# Look for the hard drive disk (not the partitions which will be appended with part-1 and so forth).

#In my example I found scsi-SATA_ST5000VN000-1H4_Z111111
#Then go into your vm.conf file (i.e. nano /etc/pve/qemu-server/101.conf) and add it manually to the device type and number that you want to passthrough.

#Here is what you would add to have it on the 6th SCSI device (scsi5)

scsi5: /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_ST5000VN000-1H4_Z111111

#Save the file and you should now see the disk when you look at the VM in Proxmox.

Such an easy solution but it took me a few hours of messing with udev to figure out.