Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) is a complete open-source platform for enterprise virtualization. It integrates the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor alongside software-defined storage and networking, managed through a unified web-based interface.
Key capabilities
Unified Management: Manage VMs, nodes, and clusters from a single UI.
High Availability: Integrated support for cluster-wide redundancy.
Understanding Proxmox Concepts
Nodes: The physical bare-metal servers running Proxmox. These provide the CPU and RAM.
Cluster: A logical group of nodes. Proxmox uses a Multi-Master architecture, meaning the Web GUI runs on every node but provides a centralized view of the entire cluster.
KVM: Kernel-based Virtual Machine provides full virtualization for running isolated OS instances such as Windows or Linux.
What can you back up from Proxmox?
Druva performs an image-level backup for the complete VM that includes the Guest operating system and data on the VM. Druva performs agent-less backup with the help of a backup appliance known as backup proxy.
You can protect:
VMs on standalone nodes
VMs on nodes in a cluster environment
View the supported versions of Proxmox VE supported by Druva.
You can perform the following backups:
Full VM
The backed-up virtual machines can be restored to:
Alternate location.
Destination location can be:same node
a different node in the same cluster
a different node in a different cluster
or any other standalone node
Other capabilities
Discovery of Proxmox VMs across nodes within a cluster
Support for both Scheduled and Manual (On-demand) backups
Support for VM backups within a node; requires at least one backup proxy deployed per node
Support for both AWS and Azure Cloud Storage
Proxmox Architecture
The following diagram illustrates the architecture:
The above diagram illustrates a direct backup to the cloud.
To back up and restore virtual machines, you have to deploy the Druva backup proxy on the Proxmox Node. The Druva backup proxy is the client-side component that detects the virtual machines running on your node and executes the backup and restore requests from the Druva Cloud.
Data is processed at the backup proxy end for deduplication, and the deduplicated data is then sent over to the Druva Cloud.
Once that data is backed up to the Druva Cloud, it is stored in the Druva storage.