Book Image

Proxmox Cookbook

By : Wasim Ahmed, Ravi K Jangid
Book Image

Proxmox Cookbook

By: Wasim Ahmed, Ravi K Jangid

Overview of this book

Proxmox VE's intuitive interface, high availability, and unique central management system puts it on par with the world’s best virtualization platforms. Its simplicity and high quality of service is what makes it the foremost choice for most system administrators. Starting with a step-by-step installation of Proxmox nodes along with an illustrated tour of Proxmox graphical user interface where you will spend most of your time managing a cluster, this book will get you up and running with the mechanisms of Proxmox VE. Various entities such as Cluster, Storage, and Firewall are also covered in an easy to understand format. You will then explore various backup solutions and restore mechanisms, thus learning to keep your applications and servers safe. Next, you will see how to upgrade a Proxmox node with a new release and apply update patches through GUI or CLI. Monitoring resources and virtual machines is required on an enterprise level, to maintain performance and uptime; to achieve this, we learn how to monitor host machine resources and troubleshoot common issues in the setup. Finally, we will walk through some advanced configurations for VM followed by a list of commands used for Proxmox and Ceph cluster through CLI. With this focused and detailed guide you will learn to work your way around with Proxmox VE quickly and add to your skillset.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Proxmox Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Hardware requirements


Proxmox can be installed on just about any commodity hardware, but in order to have a stable platform, some attention is required when selecting nodes. A setup selected for Proxmox learning can be underpowered and less expansive. While this setup is acceptable for very small environments and home usage, it will not be adequate for production-level setups where stability and redundancy is the minimum requirement.

Minimum hardware

Here are the minimum requirements to install Proxmox on a hardware node:

  • Processor: Intel or AMD 64-bit

  • Motherboard: Intel VT or AMD-V capable (not required for OpenVZ)

  • Memory: 1 GB RAM

  • Network Interface Card (NIC): 1

Based on the minimum requirement of Proxmox, here are examples of Intel and AMD-based hardware configurations that are suitable for learning:

Processor →

Requirement ↓

Intel

AMD

Processor/CPU

i3-4160 3.0 GHz

FX-4300 3.8 GHz

Motherboard

Asus B85M-D Plus 6 x SATA

Asus M5A78L-M/USB3 6 x SATA

Memory

Corsair 1 x 4 GB DDR3

Corsair 1 x 4 GB DDR3

Recommended hardware

To have a stable performing Proxmox cluster, here are the hardware configurations that are recommended:

  • An Intel or AMD 64-bit processor

  • An Intel VT or AMD-V capable Dual or Quad CPU motherboard

  • 16 GB RAM memory

  • Two Network Interface Card (NIC)

  • RAID controller with Battery Backup Unit (BBU)

  • Solid State Drives (SSD) for operating system or SSD for shared storage node

  • Fencing hardware only if HA is needed

    Note

    For more details on fencing and HA visit https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Fencing.

The following table lists the configurations of a server node that can be used in a production environment:

Requirement

Hardware

Processor/CPU

Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3 2.4 GHz

Motherboard

Intel S2600CP2 Dual LGA2011

Memory

Kingston 16 GB DDR3 Registered ECC

Power supply

Redundant

Note that the example configurations are for reference only. Your requirement will vary depending on the work load and expected performance. Adjust the hardware requirements accordingly by keeping in mind that in a hypervisor more core counts will increase performance of virtual machines rather than higher clock counts of a processor that is used. With a higher core count, more threads can be distributed among processors.

Tip

It is worth mentioning here that it is better to select a CPU with a higher cache amount for a node with large amount of memory to minimize the main memory access and maximize the performance for each CPU cores.

Proxmox is a clustered hypervisor. In order to set up a cluster, a minimum of two nodes are required. For the purpose of following through this book, when selecting hardware, be sure to have enough components to set up two nodes.

Note

For more details on Proxmox, please visit http://www.proxmox.com/.

Although a Proxmox cluster can be set up with just two nodes, a minimum of three nodes are recommended for a production environment.

Note

In a cluster, a quorum is established with a minimum of three votes. Each node is counted as single vote. The cluster health depends on this democratic system where the majority vote wins. So, in a two node cluster, when one node fails the other node can only cast one vote, creating an unresolved situation. With a three node cluster, when one node fails, the total vote from the remaining nodes is two out of possible three votes. Thus, the cluster operation continues. By any means, a two node cluster is not recommended for a production cluster. However, it is still possible to create using instructions by visiting https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Two-Node_High_Availability_Cluster.