How to build a proxmox server ?

subashcit

New Member
Jan 24, 2015
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Hi,

This is subash and am a FOSS Technologist. I am a beginner to proxmox. I have learned to install Proxmox VE in a Bare metal and have started using it for the past 6 months. Now I would like to build my own Proxmox Server.

I need to power up 50 VM's. My budget is 1000 USD. Please suggest me in buying appropriate components. I am looking to build a Mini ITX Server. I don't want tower chassis.

Please help me in buying right and quality components to build a MiniITX Proxmox server.

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,
Subash V
 
Hi,
I need to power up 50 VM's. My budget is 1000 USD. Please suggest me in buying appropriate components.

Hi I can't help you really, but I can say you something based on my experience:
"I need to power up 50 VM's" says basically nothing.
you have to consider
- how many resources those VM will need (ram, disk, network, speed)
- how important is that they're reliable (ie: do you need reliable hardware? how many nodes? and maybe HA? reliable shared storage?)
- how are you going to backup those VM?

at least... each aspect could need money. But, frankly, your budget is way too low (to me) for any serious approach for 50 VMs in production, being fast and reliable: I don't want to seem too "rude" but I think nothing below 10x that amount can't t really be minimally usable for this scope. But I could be wrong... I just don't know what you expect from your virtualization project.

If you wish to setup a single small soho server maybe but I would list here before your exact intention for those VMs: which kind? server or desktop VMs? how much ram/disk? is for a school or you will sell those VMs? what happens if the server needs maintenance or breaks? etc etc.

Marco
 
Hi,

This is subash and am a FOSS Technologist. I am a beginner to proxmox. I have learned to install Proxmox VE in a Bare metal and have started using it for the past 6 months. Now I would like to build my own Proxmox Server.

I need to power up 50 VM's. My budget is 1000 USD. Please suggest me in buying appropriate components. I am looking to build a Mini ITX Server. I don't want tower chassis.

Please help me in buying right and quality components to build a MiniITX Proxmox server.

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,
Subash V
Hi,
like Marco allready wrote, without concrete infos it's not easy. And I also think, that you will not very successful with 50VMs and 1000 USD budget...

For virtualization you need normaly (in this order)
1. much RAM
2. high IO (fast storage)
3. CPU-Power.

In some cases 1. and 2. can switched.

I have server with an FX8350 and 32GB ECC Ram (max for this platform). On this server runs app. 15 VMs. If another server fails, I can start more VMs on that node - but not easy, because 32GB is not enough.
So I think 50 VMs are fully out of scope... (for me, or rather the kind of VMs which I use).

Mini-ITX?! OK, on new motherboards, you can use up to 64GB ram, but no ECC (AFAIK)!
And which HDDs do you want to use for 50 VMs? You need some TB?! And very fast disks, otherwise some VMs will slow down the whole system.
I think minimum is 6 sata-hdds in raid-10 with an fast raid-controller, like areca.

At this point it's not easy with 1000 USD, because you need 50-80% of the money for the raidcontroller... ontop the BBU!

Udo
 
At this point it's not easy with 1000 USD, because you need 50-80% of the money for the raidcontroller... ontop the BBU!

Our next release will include zfs on linux, so it should be possible to go without HW RAID controller. But that also
means that you need even more RAM (zfs really need RAM!).
 
Hi Marc, Thanks for the detailed reply. Our purpose is to build a box for Indian SME which should have minimum 5 VM instances running exclusively for ERP, DMS, Email, File Server and Project Management. We are basically open source implementers of OpenERP and Alfresco. Thus planning to create virtual appliances running in our own hardware. We are ready to Scale up our budgets. Kindly suggest us to build a robust Proxmox server which should have minimum 5 VMs and has a capacity to run at least 15 VMs.
 
Hi Udo, Thanks for your answer, I hve mentioned my requirement above, we are planning to launch a FOSS Box which will be powered by Proxmox with individual server VM for running ERP and DMS. Our target segment will normally have up to maximum100 users. Help me in arriving a proper hardware spec for such a box.
 
based on your over-generalization of your requirements, I suggest you buy a server from a vendor with SUPPORT.

100 users doing what? Concurrent users?

How large is the database? How important is the I/O going to need to be for the database? SQL, MySQL, PostGRE, Mongo, Couch?

How much email is flowing through this system?

How large does the file server need to be?

What are the specs on the VMs you want to host? 5-15 VMs could vary widely, depending on what OS and workload is being handled by the OS.

You seriously need to line out the REAL requirements before anyone can help you, but I can tell you it won't be less than $2k
 
100 Perpetual users using ERP. Database of ERP will not exceed 75 GB a year, email server will be deployed with zimbra provisioning up to 100 email clients. DB will be postgre for all our applications. Need a file server with 1TB hard disk. We are trying to create a prototype product with our own hardware and thus requesting suggestions to build our own bare metal. We will be using Ubuntu as Host OS as well guest OS for 8 VMs. Remaining 2 VMS we need to install windows server.
 
100 Perpetual users using ERP. Database of ERP will not exceed 75 GB a year, email server will be deployed with zimbra provisioning up to 100 email clients. DB will be postgre for all our applications. Need a file server with 1TB hard disk. We are trying to create a prototype product with our own hardware and thus requesting suggestions to build our own bare metal. We will be using Ubuntu as Host OS as well guest OS for 8 VMs. Remaining 2 VMS we need to install windows server.
Hold on.

You should be using ProxMox as the host OS, not Ubuntu.
 
Hi, Please suggest me few vendors in India like pogolinux.com. where I could purchase a open source bare metal in which I shall install proxmox
 
Simply put, your arent going to be able to do what you are trying with $1,000 or 2,000 dollars. It sounds like you are trying to build an appliance to retail as opposed to SAAS. If you were going for SAAS, you should look more into redundancy and shared storage, but your appliance requirements for those types of systems is going to require no less than 4 x 10k disks in raid 1+0 which will, if new eat up almost your whole budget in order to get over 1 TB of usable storage. Yiu also havent specified if you are using KVM or VPS container for the linux systems, as the choice there makes a big difference. If you are trying to do this with commodity hardware and sata drives its simply going to run like shit when 100 users are loaded onto it.
 
For your vms that are database driven, 15k sas drives or perhaps a pair of ssds for the databases would be best, you could mount the fileserver data to a slower set of disks, maybe sata if you went with ssd. You could have vibration issues affecting drive life if you vary the spindle speed too much between drives, but two enterpruse ssds will work wuth a pair of large anything just fine. Calculate 8 gigs of RAM per host as a ball park figure. More is always better. Dual quad xeon for the cpu. Dont go crazy with the allocations on cpu though. Min 2 core per machine, you can add more as needed, better to start low and increase than over allocate. Your nics shoukd be gig with toe built in. The more the merrier really. Depending on the switch they connect to will determin how you will allocate them. Quad intel nic w/toe can span two switches with some sort of link agg for each pair for redundancy. Your network likely wont be your bottleneck though. If you have enough ram and cpu, which is probably doable kn your budget, the make or break will be the disk I/O. If you can get ecc ram, you should. If you can buy enetrprise grade drives you should. You could build a consumer box with enough cpu, ram, and consumer ssd and sata drives to meet these needs, but you better have a bullet proof backup plan for when the drives crater in spectacular fashion.
 

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