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FEATURE DEEP DIVE

Eight storage backends, one wizard, and a watchdog that never sleeps

Ceph, LVM, ZFS, QCOW2, NFS and Proxmox-native storage onboard through a single guided wizard. A 30-second collapse watchdog pauses only the at-risk instances before a thin pool corrupts a disk.

app.virtconsole.com/storage
VirtConsole storage backend dashboard showing pool capacity, watchdog status and backend types
01

Eight backends, one wizard

Sell differentiated storage tiers from a single hypervisor.

Block and file

Ceph RBD, LVM thin and thick, ZFS thin and thick, QCOW2, NFS and Proxmox-native. Thin variants over-provision; ZFS brings checksumming and compression.

Guided onboarding

A five-step wizard probes the hypervisor live before anything is saved: tooling verified, pool existence checked, real capacity reported.

Classes & I/O limits

HDD, SAS, SSD and NVMe classes per hypervisor, with per-plan read/write IOPS and bandwidth limits.

02

Safety systems

Thin provisioning’s dark side is pool exhaustion. Two layers of defense ship by default.

Collapse watchdog

Every hypervisor watches its pools every 30 seconds. Approaching exhaustion pauses only the at-risk instances before disks corrupt, and mails every admin.

Operator-controlled recovery

Paused instances keep RAM and disk state. Fix the pool, resume from where they stopped.

Storage health dashboard

Live data and metadata usage, ZFS pool state and fragmentation, fed by the same probes the watchdog uses.

03

Instance backups

Streaming, incremental, and verified.

Stream anywhere

Backups stream directly to S3, SFTP, FTP or any rclone remote with zero local staging.

Incremental chains

Sparse QCOW2 incrementals via QEMU dirty bitmaps, across all backends including raw block devices.

Policies & retention

Automated schedules with retention pruning, failure alerting that always sends, and auto-pause for repeatedly failing plans.

04

Proxmox Backup Server

One PBS destination for both hypervisor types, with real deduplication and a restore that outlives the source instance.

One backend, both hypervisors

Back up plain KVM hypervisors and Proxmox VE nodes to the same Proxmox Backup Server destination from one panel, under the same policies, schedules and retention rules.

Incremental, deduplicated, verified

Reads only the blocks changed since the last backup, and every backup lands in a PBS datastore that deduplicates chunks across every instance stored there. Each snapshot carries a server-verified integrity state, checked independently of any restore.

Outlives the instance, restores anywhere

Destroying an instance keeps its backups by default, and a protected backup is never deleted. Restore in place or into a brand-new instance, even from an already-deleted source, with billing that follows automatically. Customers back up and restore their own instances from the panel.

05

Provider-managed backups

A backup posture your admins set once at the location, not one every customer configures for themselves.

Default policy per location

A hypervisor group carries a default backup policy that every new instance inherits automatically the moment it deploys there, no per-instance setup required.

Throttled per node

Backups run under a per-node throttle, so a scheduled backup wave never competes with customer I/O for the whole storage pool at once.

Rebuild a dead node from its backups

Every hypervisor writes a nightly configuration bundle to its backup storage. If the node dies, pick a replacement and the platform restores each instance from its latest backup chain, re-homes networking, and reports progress as a task.

06

Volumes & object storage

Block volumes with real recovery paths, and S3 your customers self-serve.

Volume snapshots

Instant on-storage rollback marks and full DR exports, with in-place or restore-to-new-volume modes.

S3 object storage

MinIO-based S3-compatible buckets: self-service creation, access keys, bandwidth tracking, quotas and hourly billing. Works with any S3 client.

Verified restores

Restores verify the staged artifact and use tmp-then-rename, so a partial download can never replace a disk.

Deeper look

Every backup, tracked to the job that made it

Scheduled and manual backups across instances, with status, size and retention visible at a glance.

app.virtconsole.com/backups
VirtConsole backup list showing scheduled and manual backups with status, size and retention

Backups across the fleet: status, size and retention in one list

More of the platform

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