Book Image

Mastering Proxmox - Second Edition

By : Wasim Ahmed
Book Image

Mastering Proxmox - Second Edition

By: Wasim Ahmed

Overview of this book

Proxmox is an open source server virtualization solution that has enterprise-class features to manage virtual machines, to be used for storage, and to virtualize both Linux and Windows application workloads. You begin with refresher on the advanced installation features and the Proxmox GUI to familiarize yourself with the Proxmox VE hypervisor. You then move on to explore Proxmox under the hood, focusing on the storage systems used with Proxmox. Moving on, you will learn to manage KVM Virtual Machines and Linux Containers and see how networking is handled in Proxmox. You will then learn how to protect a cluster or a VM with a firewall and explore the new HA features introduced in Proxmox VE 4 along with the brand new HA simulator. Next, you will dive deeper into the backup/restore strategy followed by learning how to properly update and upgrade a Proxmox node. Later, you will learn how to monitor a Proxmox cluster and all of its components using Zabbix. By the end of the book, you will become an expert at making Proxmox environments work in production environments with minimum downtime.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Mastering Proxmox - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Local storage versus shared storage


Shared storage is not absolutely necessary in a Proxmox cluster environment, but without a doubt, it makes storage management a simpler task. In a small business environment, it may be fine not to have 24/7 uptime and 100% reliability, so a local storage system will suffice. When data grows beyond several terabytes, it may or may not fully justify shared storage. The question is how important is budget, reliability, resiliency, and accessibility. In most enterprise virtual environments with critical data, shared storage is the only logical choice due to the benefits it brings to the whole cluster operation. The following are considered benefits of using shared storage:

  • Live migration of a virtual machine

  • Seamless expansion of multinode storage space

  • Centralized backup

  • Multilevel data tiering

  • Central storage management

Live migration of a virtual machine

This is probably one of the important sought after reasons to go for a shared storage system. Live migration...