Advice on upgrading Proxmox 3.4 cluster with DRBD

[carles89]

Hi everybody,

I need some advice on upgrading a 3 node Proxmox 3.4 HA Cluster with this config:

Hardware
Server 1 (Proxmox VE 3.4)
1x Intel Xeon E5-2620
32GB RAM
LSI Hardware Raid + 512MB Cache + BBU
2x 400GB SAS10K RAID1 -> root + local storage
2x 1TB SAS10K RAID1 -> DRBD 8
3x Gigabit LAN (1x VM Bridge + Proxmox Administration, 1x DRBD, 1x Fencing IPMI)

Server 2 (Proxmox VE 3.4)
1x Intel Xeon E5-2620
32GB RAM
LSI Hardware Raid + 512MB Cache + BBU
2x 400GB SAS10K RAID1 -> root + local storage
2x 1TB SAS10K RAID1 -> DRBD 8
3x Gigabit LAN (1x VM Bridge + Proxmox Administration, 1x DRBD, 1x Fencing IPMI)

Server 3 (Ubuntu 12.04) -> Used only for quorum pruposes
1x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 V2 @ 3.10GHz
4GB RAM
2x 250GB SATA (MDADM RAID1)
2x Gigabit LAN (Only using 1 NIC)

VMs
Only 2 Windows VMs, both stored on the DRBD 8 volume (replicated as Primary/Primary).

1x Windows Server 2008 R2 AD + SQL Server
1x Windows Server 2008 RDS Server

This configuration worked flawessly for almost 3 years, but now the time for upgrading to PVE 4.4 is running out, and we just realized that DRBD9 will not be supported by Proxmox anymore due to license changes.

What would you suggest to do? Since the servers have HW Controllers, we can not use Ceph, and I read that GlusterFS does not like SQL Databases:

Gluster does not support so called “structured data”, meaning live, SQL databases.

(https://gluster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Install-Guide/Overview/)

I thought on upgrading both first nodes to PVE 4.4, install PVE 4.4 on the third one (using it only for storing ISOs and quorum) and replace DRBD with GlusterFS, but then I heard about the license changes and don't know what to do. Should I just stay with DRBD 8?

Any help would be much appreciated

Thanks in advance!

 

[carles89]

Hi,

No one has any suggestion?

Thank you!

 

[Ashley]

No reason you can't use CEPH just pass through each disk as a single Raid0, however you would need to start from scratch and restore the VM's from a backup if you wished to change the storage system.

You can use DRBD just has to be installed directly from their repo, as license means Proxmox are unable to provide in their repo.

 

[carles89]

Hi Ashley,

Thanks for your answer. As I see, DRBD 8 is still on PVE 4 repos because it's prior to the license changes (?), so I think I could upgrade safely to PVE4 + DRBD 8 and eventually upgrade to DRBD9 (but i'm unconfortable without Proxmox Team support).

And what about GlusterFS? Have you ever tried it with VMs using Microsoft SQL?

CEPH may be an option, but I'm not sure if I'll have to add SSDs for cache. Is using RAID controller's cache with CEPH a good practice? Or should I avoid that and go for SSD Caching?

Thanks

 

[fabian]

there is no DRBD 8 in PVE 4.

 

[carles89]

Hi Fabian,

I was looking to drbd8-utils (dummy package) instead of drbd-utils.

There is no way to still use DRBD8 on PVE4? I see there is still a drbdmanage and drbd-utils package on both pve-enterprise and pve-no-subscription repo.

root@xxx:~# apt-cache policy drbdmanage
drbdmanage:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 0.97.3-1
  Version table:
     0.97.3-1 0
        500 https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/ jessie/pve-enterprise amd64 Packages
     0.97-1 0
        500 https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/ jessie/pve-enterprise amd64 Packages
     0.96-1 0
        500 https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/ jessie/pve-enterprise amd64 Packages
     0.95-1 0
        500 https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/ jessie/pve-enterprise amd64 Packages
     0.94-1 0
        500 https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/ jessie/pve-enterprise amd64 Packages
     0.91-1 0
        500 https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/ jessie/pve-enterprise amd64 Packages
     0.50-2 0
        500 https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/ jessie/pve-enterprise amd64 Packages

root@xxx:~# apt-cache policy drbd-utils
drbd-utils:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 8.9.8-1
  Version table:
     8.9.8-1 0
        500 https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/ jessie/pve-enterprise amd64 Packages
     8.9.7-1 0
        500 https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/ jessie/pve-enterprise amd64 Packages
     8.9.6-1 0
        500 https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/ jessie/pve-enterprise amd64 Packages
     8.9.4-1 0
        500 https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/ jessie/pve-enterprise amd64 Packages
     8.9.2~rc1-2+deb8u1 0
        500 http://ftp.es.debian.org/debian/ jessie/main amd64 Packages