Planning advice

[N0_Klu3]

Hi all,

I'm looking for some advice.
I have 2 main nodes that I want to use, I dont NEED HA, but it would be nice to have.
Basically I plan to run the 2 sorta individual nodes, but be able to transfer VM's across if needed. (was thinking of using the Datacentre Manager)
I was planning to put them in their own Datacentre.

I have another box that I was going to do a dedicated Proxmox Backup Server on, but now I am wondering if it would be better to rather install Proxmox.
Then do a PBS VM and pass through a storage device for backups.

That way I can have 3 PVE's for quorum?

Or can anyone else think of anything better?
Maybe PBS stand alone, and then install the qdevice or whatever it's called?

Basically my long and short is I have 2 main powerful nodes.
I would like to be able to transfer VM's/LXC's from one to the other.
I'm not too (although would be nice to have) bothered about shared storage, they can be down and transfer across slowly.
If one dies I can restore from backups.

 

[aaron]

What I do in some personal infra is the following:

2x PVE nodes with local ZFS storage (same name)
1x PBS + PVE side by side bare metal.

The 2x PVE nodes are clustered. To be able to use HA I make sure that the VMs all have the Replication enabled. For Mailservers and other VMs where any data loss is painful, I replicate with the shortest possible interval of 1 minute. Other VMs, like a DNS server, are replicated with longer intervals.

On the PBS server I have one LXC container running which is providing the external part of the QDevice, so that the 2x PVE nodes get their 3rd vote and can handle HA and downtimes of one node.
I could have installed the external QDevice part directly on the PBS bare-metal as well, but opted to put it into a dedicated container.
The benefit, compared to creating a full 3-node cluster is that the 2x PVE nodes are pretty much built the same, while the PBS machine is built very differently. So by not including the PBS machine in the PVE cluster directly, I don't have take care that no VMs will end up on the PBS machine.
Also cabling gets a lot easier. The PBS machine has two cables connected, one for IPMI, the other for PBS itself.
While on the 2x PVE nodes I do have quite a bit more NICs in use with VLAN trunking and so forth .
Also, the PBS machine is physically in a different part of the house, in case of fire, flood, and so on