Best option for getting HA to work across two servers?

Oct 27, 2018
10
2
3
West Norway
Hi,

I recently scored a good deal on two used Fujitsu TX100 S3p servers. I seem to remember Proxmox supporting the use of a quorum disk to replace the third required node in a cluster so I wanted to set these two servers up as a HA Proxmox cluster with external iSCSI storage.

However the support for a quorum disk seems to have been removed since then based on the information I can find. The wiki only contains a guide about using a Raspberry Pi as your third node with a big "Please do not do this to anything important" warning all over it.

What is my best option for getting these two servers set up in an HA-capable cluster? Do I have to buy a cheap Intel NUC or similar to install proxmox on and put in the cluster just to have the third quorum vote?
 
you need at least three nodes.
You can do HA with 2 PVE nodes and a 3rd “Quorum Device” (qdevice) which provides votes to the 2 main PVE nodes.

I have a 2 Node PVE cluster with a 3rd qdevice and it works well - For the qdevice, I simply run a VM (debian9) on my NAS, but the Raspberry Pi should work equally as well since my qdevice load is minuscule.

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Cluster_Manager
 
I personally do not use or recommend the use of this variant in some important production cluster.
 
I personally do not use or recommend the use of this variant in some important production cluster.
Completely agree - As I’m sure it also says in the wiki.

I use the qdevice only for homelab cluster - it does work well though...
 
Yes but PVE does not need to be installed on the 3rd “Node”, indeed the 3rd “Node” appears not as a Node in the Cluster Manager, but as a “qdevice”...

Further to the Cluster Manager wiki page above, I also found the following thread useful when I setup my cluster:

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pve5-and-quorum-device.37183/page-2#post-252807

This looks like exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. So there's just a standard debian package to install and then point your Proxmox servers at it using pvecm? That sounds quite simple.

How long have you been running a setup like this?

My setup isn't exactly production, it's more like half-homelab, half-production as I host a few less-critical public facing sites using VMs. If this setup using a Raspberry Pi as a quorum device is more stable than the Wiki makes it out to be, then I'll probably set mine up like this.
 
This looks like exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. So there's just a standard debian package to install and then point your Proxmox servers at it using pvecm? That sounds quite simple.

How long have you been running a setup like this?
Yes, there is a standard Debian package for this and it’s fairly simple to setup - Follow the Cluster Manager wiki link above (specifically the “Corosync External Vote Support” section) and take a look at the forum thread I referenced above where I clarified some items from the wiki...

I’ve been running the cluster with the qdevice for a few weeks now - Others have been running it longer though I’m sure.
 
Yes, there is a standard Debian package for this and it’s fairly simple to setup - Follow the Cluster Manager wiki link above (specifically the “Corosync External Vote Support” section) and take a look at the forum thread I referenced above where I clarified some items from the wiki...

I’ve been running the cluster with the qdevice for a few weeks now - Others have been running it longer though I’m sure.
Yeah I read them and it looks perfect.

The servers I bought are still in transit, but hopefully I'll have them tomorrow. I'll try this setup once they arrive and see if I can get it working. Thanks for the info
 
I got my servers on Friday and set up the cluster over the weekend. Used a Raspberry Pi as a Quorum device.

The cluster has been running fine over the weekend while I configured a few VMs and I've tested shutting down servers multiple times. HA works like a charm.

Thanks n1nj4888
 
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I got my servers on Friday and set up the cluster over the weekend. Used a Raspberry Pi as a Quorum device.

The cluster has been running fine over the weekend while I configured a few VMs and I've tested shutting down servers multiple times. HA works like a charm.

Thanks n1nj4888
Glad it’s working well for you!
 
We run a number of production 2 node clusters with this method and have had zero issues. We have 6 out in the field and 6 inhouse, for well over 6 months without a single issue. These clusters were even 2 node proxmox3 clusters and we worked out a method to remotely upgrade them to proxmox5 and cut them over to this new quorum disk method. Some of these 2 node clusters have been in place for well over 5 years.
 
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We run a number of production 2 node clusters with this method and have had zero issues. We have 6 out in the field and 6 inhouse, for well over 6 months without a single issue. These clusters were even 2 node proxmox3 clusters and we worked out a method to remotely upgrade them to proxmox5 and cut them over to this new quorum disk method. Some of these 2 node clusters have been in place for well over 5 years.

Hi, I was just wondering what kind of storage you would use in a 2+1 nodes setup. Before switching from Xen to Proxmox , I used DRB. What do you gals & guys use?
 
Hi, I was just wondering what kind of storage you would use in a 2+1 nodes setup. Before switching from Xen to Proxmox , I used DRB. What do you gals & guys use?
Probably just a simple zfs setup with replication. Really depends on your requirements for HA failover and performance.
 

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