Advice on migration path from VMWare

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ecrofirt

New Member
Jul 14, 2024
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Hi all!

The college I work at is looking to migrate away from our VMWare infrastructure when our contract expires this year. I've been very interested in Proxmox, but I hit some stumbling blocks in the early phases of migration that may prove to be a big hurdle for us to overcome. I could use some advice from the experts here. Thank you all for you attention and help!

Here's our current setup:
  • We're runing a smallish deployment of around 100 VMs.
  • Our storage is a Dell PowerVault M5084 SAN with iSCSI connections to our data switches. The SAN doesn't have the ability to present the storage as anything other than iSCSI LUNs.
  • Our (soon to go away) VMWare infrastructure is a series of old Dell/IBM servers, all connected to the data switches, using the LUNs as VMFS datastores.
I was hoping to replicate this setup with Proxmox but I'm running into what appears to be a fundamental design philosophy between the two environments: Proxmox doesn't seem to be geared toward cluster filesystems with shared storage, but rather towards distributed software defined storage with Ceph.

I know I can set up iSCSI storage with an LVM on top of it in Proxmox, but it appears to be pretty knee-capped with no support for snapshots or thin provisioning. I don't have the budget to purchase more servers to set up distributed redundant storage, so it seems like Ceph is out, as is anything from Blockbridge.

What avenues, if any do I realistically have? I've seen some folks using GFS2 or OCFS2, but I've seen some concerns about stability of this as a solution.

Thanks everyone, and I appreciate your help and the time you've taken to read/answer this.
 
Wouldn't it be possible to simply move the disks out of the SAN, distribute them across the Dell and IBM systems, and then install CEPH on top?
 
ecrofirt said:
What avenues, if any do I realistically have? I've seen some folks using GFS2 or OCFS2, but I've seen some concerns about stability of this as a solution.
Click to expand...
Hi @ecrofirt , your research is correct - if you are looking for an apples to apples solution, those ^^^ are your two options.

Proxmox does not come with native Cluster Filesystem, so you need to install/configure/support one thats available as Open Source on your own.

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox
 
bbgeek17 said:
Hi @ecrofirt , your research is correct - if you are looking for an apples to apples solution, those ^^^ are your two options.

Proxmox does not come with native Cluster Filesystem, so you need to install/configure/support one thats available as Open Source on your own.

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox
Click to expand...

Thanks bbgeek!

Is there a general recommendation for which cluster fs to use? I haven't seen anything conclusive, but I'm willing to try anything.
 
ecrofirt said:
Is there a general recommendation for which cluster fs to use? I haven't seen anything conclusive, but I'm willing to try anything.
Click to expand...
There is no general recommendation, as neither is an officially supported solution. You'd need to research each option, look at their viability, supportability, stability, etc.

Good luck


Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox
 
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Thank you again, I appreciate you taking the time to answer the thread and confirm what I'd found more than you could possibly know. Have a great day!
 
Given your current constraints, the simplest and most cost-effective approach would likely be to use iSCSI with LVM for your primary storage needs and supplement it with a distributed file system like GlusterFS for secondary storage and backups. But still need to test and research.
 
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