Book Image

Mastering Proxmox - Third Edition

By : Wasim Ahmed
Book Image

Mastering Proxmox - Third Edition

By: Wasim Ahmed

Overview of this book

Proxmox is an open source server virtualization solution that has enterprise-class features for managing virtual machines, for storage, and to virtualize both Linux and Windows application workloads. You'll begin with a refresher on the advanced installation features and the Proxmox GUI to familiarize yourself with the Proxmox VE hypervisor. Then, you'll move on to explore Proxmox under the hood, focusing on storage systems, such as Ceph, used with Proxmox. Moving on, you'll learn to manage KVM virtual machines, deploy Linux containers fast, and see how networking is handled in Proxmox. You'll also learn how to protect a cluster or a VM with a firewall and explore the new high availability features introduced in Proxmox VE 5.0. Next, you'll dive deeper into the backup/restore strategy and see how to properly update and upgrade a Proxmox node. Later, you'll learn how to monitor a Proxmox cluster and all of its components using Zabbix. Finally, you'll discover how to recover Promox from disaster strikes through some real-world examples. By the end of the book, you'll be an expert at making Proxmox work in production environments with minimal downtime.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Recovering from OS drive failure


OS drive failure is one of the critical failures when a node becomes fully inaccessible. Since Proxmox stores all cluster-related configuration files on Proxmox Cluster file system (pmxcfs), no cluster data is lost even when the OS drive fails completely. Refer to Chapter 3, Proxmox under the Hood, to recap details on pmxcfs. There are mainly two types of OS drive failure:

  • Physical drive failure
  • OS data corruption

Physical drive failure

This failure occurs when the physical drive itself becomes completely unusable or defective. In this scenario, the only option is to replace the damaged drive with a new one and install clean Proxmox VE on it. One way to prevent downtime due to physical drive failure is to use two physical drives for the OS in mirror mode. During Proxmox installation, we can select the Advanced option to create a ZFS mirror on two physical drives. This way when one drive becomes physically damaged, it does not cause any downtime since there is...