Volunteers Wanted to test Virtual Machine Cloud Platform!

[wahmed]

Hello Proxmox Community,
I am excited to offer this opportunity to our Proxmox Community who helped me shape and form my knowledge on Clusters based on Proxmox and brought me where I am today.

I am part of a start-up IT company, Symmcom based out of Calgary, Canada and avid supporter of all things Open Source. We are specially fond of Proxmox and all that it can do. We have taken up a project to see how far Proxmox can be pushed and setup a test platform for Virtual Machines to be tested remotely by many users. Each volunteer will be given 1 or more Virtual Machine and access to ISO Storage to install OS of their choice. What better way to test it other than by the people who already knows Proxmox, our community.

Please keep in mind, we are NOT affiliated with Proxmox company in any way and there is NO money involve. Your effort will be pure voluntary. NO money is being generated through this project. It is purely test purpose only.

Our goal is to see how at which point our test platform maxes out and how Proxmox performs under immense pressure of live users. The test platform is setup using Proxmox as Server/VM Cluster and CEPH as Storage Cluster. You will be using the VMs just like you would use your desktop. All VMs will have to be accessed using SPICE. There is NO restriction how you would want to use the machines.

Following are some expectations from all volunteer testers:
1. Use the VM like your own.
2. Provide regular feedback of any sort of issues.
3. User is responsible to secure their VM with password.
4. None of the test VMs will be backed up, so do not save something you do not want to lose. Users will be given minimum of 1GB separate storage to save important files.
5. Leave the VM turned on at all times so we can monitor the Cluster performance.


What you should expect from us:
1. Appreciate regularly your effort and say Thank You!
2. Provide as stable and secured platform as possible to create real world scenario where long downtime is not acceptable.
3. Help you get started with your assigned Virtual Machine.
4. Provide minimum 1GB of separate storage for data safe keep which will be backed up regularly.

Upon receiving your request, we will send you an email with login info and all details you will need to start using your assigned Virtual Machine. There is no restriction on who can and cannot apply. All are welcome. Our goal is to fill up 100 users. We still have about 70 seats. If our cluster maxes out before we get that far, the number will be cut short.

Known issues of the Cloud Platform at this moment:
1. Video performance is not up to the par. If you are playing any video, try to test it in small window without maximizing.
2. Audio seems to be 99% ok, but sometimes Audio and Video gets out of sync.
3. Slow upload speed due to restriction in being test platform.

An example of Typical Virtual Machine provided:
CPU : Single
RAM : 1.5GB
HDD : 50GB
NIC : 1
CD-Rom : 1 (Access to ISO Storage for OS Installer ISOs)
OS : Windows XP Pro 32 Bit (pre-loaded). Valid License Provided.

If you are interested to participate in this never-before-tried Project, send your request to : beta@symmcom.com
with your First/Last name, email address you would like to use and country of origin.

[[[DISCLAIMER : THIS PROJECT IS PURELY FOR TESTING PURPOSE ONLY. THE PROVIDER, SYMMCOM IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE CAUSED OR TIME LOST BY ANY USERS. THE USER UNDERSTANDS THAT ANY EFFORT FROM THEM IS PURELY VOLUNTEER BASIS.]]]

-Wasim Ahmed
Senior IT Consultant, Symmcom

 

[mir]

> OS : Windows 7 Pro 32 Bit (pre-loaded)
I hope you have your licenses in order or you could end up with a huge bill!

 

[wahmed]

> OS : Windows 7 Pro 32 Bit (pre-loaded)
I hope you have your licenses in order or you could end up with a huge bill!

Pre-loaded comes with "Activate within 30 Days" thingy. So people still will need to provide the license on their own. But we do have enough Windows XP legit licenses. So if anybody do not have their own Windows 7 licenses, they can still request Windows XP licenses for free. I am going to edit my original post so it is clear. Thanks for pointing out

 

[wahmed]

There seems to be little bit of confusion about Windows 7 Preloaded VM. Please note that we are changing the Preloaded Windows 7 to Windows XP with legit license. If you want to use any other OS, you can still do so by using ISOs stored in the ISO Storage which can be accessed through your Proxmox Web GUI but you will have to provide your own license.

Thanks to all who already emailed with your request!! You will receive an email soon with your login info and detailed instruction! Welcome aboard pioneer Testers.

 

[mir]

Could you revile something about your hardware and setup? Pictures would be nice too

 

[Raymond Burns]

I would like to be apart of the benchmark, and wonder if you need any help?

 

[wahmed]

Could you revile something about your hardware and setup? Pictures would be nice too

By picture did you mean Network diagram/map etc?

The setup is not very robust. We tried to use easily accessible, off the shelf product such as i7 CPU and Intel motherboards. Following is some list of hardware we are using for the test environment:
3 Proxmox Nodes with identical specs
CPU : Intel i7 3770
Motherboard : Intel DQ77MK
RAM : 32 GB
Node HDD : 60GB SSD . No RAID
NIC : 3 x Intel Pro gigabit

2 CEPH Nodes for Shared Storage with identical specs.
Cluster Storage : 32 TB
CPU : Intel i3 2120
Motherboard : Entry level Xeon
RAM : 32 GB

1 FreeNAS Node for Backup with 12TB Backup Storage


All VMs(27) are running from Node 1. Node 2 and Node 3 empty to accommodate future VMs after Node 1 is full. 2 other testing platform using the same 3 Node Proxmox Cluster. Each test platforms, including Virtual Desktops for volunteer testers are isolated from each other using Proxmox Virtual Switch and separate Subnets. Each subnet has its own pfSense Virtualized Firewall and ClearOS Domain Controller.
All VMs are stored on CEPH Storage Cluster using RBD. Backups of critical VMs are done on FreeNAS backup node using NFS.

I think this is pretty much how the setup is right now. Let me know if i missed something.

 

[wahmed]

I would like to be apart of the benchmark, and wonder if you need any help?

Absolutely!! Right now i have nobody who can actually do some proper benchmarking. If you can help out getting some real numbers that would be awesome! Just email to beta@symmcom.com with the info needed and we will send you the login info.
Thanks!

 

[wahmed]

There was a Virtual Machine interruption around 6:30PM MST Sept. 17th due to a misconfiguration of Firewall by one of our Staff. Everything is back on now.

Apologies to all Beta Testers who tried to use their VM and could not access Proxmox WebGUI.

 

[SamTzu]

Are you using btrfs with CEPH?

 

[wahmed]

To All Beta Testers

There was an issue installing external SSL in the Proxmox nodes which resulting error when trying to access VMs. I will let you know as soon as we have fixed the issue

 

[wahmed]

To All Beta Testers

There was an issue installing external SSL in the Proxmox nodes which resulting error when trying to access VMs. I will let you know as soon as we have fixed the issue

Looks like Console access is up and running. SPICE still having difficulties. It keep giving Unable to Connect to Graphics Driver error.

 

[wahmed]

All service is back on again. Thank you all beta tester for your patience and sending feedback emails regarding the SSL issue!

 

[wahmed]

Our Beta Testing participants around the world as of Sept 20th.


Photo Source: Google Map

Thanks to all for being part of this project!

 

[wahmed]

Are you using btrfs with CEPH?

CEPH is setup with XFS. There was an issue with btrfs which i cannot recall at this moment that i went with XFS.

 

[wahmed]

One of the CEPH Node Performance Snapshot

 

[wahmed]

FEW REQUESTS
============

First of all we just cannot thank enough everybody who has actively participated in the Cloud Testing Group! Your effort is much appreciated, more than you know.

I have already outlined the nature of this project in my original posting in this thread, but i will stress it little bit more as we are experiencing slight difficulties. This project is purely for testing purpose to push Proxmox and CEPH as far as it can be pushed. There has not been any resource assigned to this other than none but "myself". We just do not want to allocate staff resources into this for obvious reason.
Although your feedback is extremely valuable to us, sending more than one email of same issue and asking to fix it soon is just not right. I can assure you that i personally go through every single email and reply them. We know the I/O performance issue and when enough knowledge gathered it will be taken care. To address issues is what intrigued this project.

It also has been pointed out that service interruption is "unacceptable" due to the interruption caused by recent SSL installation. Like me who ever is in IT Support business knows very well about the "unacceptable" nature of Service Interruption. I apologize for the Inconvenience it might have caused you, but do keep in mind the "nature of this beta testing project". My goal is to have the service running with "as little interruption as possible" to create real life scenario, but because we are all learning here through this project, some interruption is simply unavoidable.

My request to you is do not let this stop you from sending emails, but try to keep it at minimum. I have an "Issue List" where i put down all the issues being mentioned by testers. Every single one of them will be scratched off in time.

I thank you deeply for the effort you all putting in!

 

[mir]

Why do you use ext4? The recommended file system in production is XFS

"Note
We currently recommend XFS for production deployments. We recommend btrfs for testing, development, and any non-critical deployments. We believe that btrfs has the correct feature set and roadmap to serve Ceph in the long-term, but XFS andext4 provide the necessary stability for today’s deployments. btrfs development is proceeding rapidly: users should be comfortable installing the latest released upstream kernels and be able to track development activity for critical bug fixes."

 

[wahmed]

Why do you use ext4? The recommended file system in production is XFS

I actually take back what i said about File System type in the CEPH OSDs. All the OSDs are indeed XFS. It was my mistake, i was looking at the HDD that the OS is installed. I will update my previous post. Sorry for the confusion.

I was so hopeful ext4 was causing the slow down. I guess not.

 

[wahmed]

Last One Hour of Stat. All 49 VMs turned on. Unsure exactly how many users are actively using their VMs. Would like to know what you all think about the numbers, how realistic they are.