Choosing virtualisation platform - a few q's on Proxmox VE

[caelis]

I can't find a better place to ask, so I'm asking here.

We are currently looking for virtualisation platform to move some of our servers to virtual environment. Most for them are Linux servers, two or three are Freebsd and one server running Windows. Previously we planned to use XCP, which is a great platform with powerful console tool XE, but graphical management tools is really weak. Long story short, the only stable management tool for XCP (and XenServer) is Citrix XenCenter, but it is also far from perfect and it is Windows only, while our IT department doesn't have any Windows workstations. I myself find ridiculously stupid the idea to buy Windows licence just to run XenCenter.
For some reason I never heard for Proxmox VE before, but by the quick look I'm stunned... Developers made a great job indeed. So I have a few questions to the community which is important for us.

1. Is it still not recommended to use software raids within Proxmox VE? Can I set up mdadm device, add it as new LVM volume or just format it and mount as directory, and then use as a local storage to keep my VM images?
2. Wiki says that Proxmox VE needs CPU with hardware virtualization support. But as far as I know Proxmox VE uses both KVM and OpenVZ; we have a few old but still powerful servers without hardware virtualization support, can we use them to install Proxmox VE to run OpenVZ virtualization?
3. What I really like about XCP is its powerful cli XE tool. I would like to know what cli tools I can use to manage Proxmox VE using command line? Where I can find a manual on Proxmox VE command line tools?
4. Not really a problem or serious thing, but... is it really not possible to download a backup of the machine with web interface? I can easily do that with scp tool over ssh, but it is kinda strange that you can upload files via web interface, but can't easily download a copy of VM.
5. A thing that bugs me a little: Proxmox VE binds VNC consoles to external ip of the machine. In XCP they binded to localhost, and you need to tunnel them via ssh to connect. XCP way seems to be more secure; what is official recommendations to protect VNC consoles on Proxmox VE?

Thank you for you great job.

 

[dietmar]

1. Is it still not recommended to use software raids within Proxmox VE? Can I set up mdadm device, add it as new LVM volume or just format it and mount as directory, and then use as a local storage to keep my VM images?

We (Proxmox) do not support software raid, and we do not recommend to use it. But you can still use that if you really want.

2. Wiki says that Proxmox VE needs CPU with hardware virtualization support. But as far as I know Proxmox VE uses both KVM and OpenVZ; we have a few old but still powerful servers without hardware virtualization support, can we use them to install Proxmox VE to run OpenVZ virtualization?

yes, that should work.

3. What I really like about XCP is its powerful cli XE tool. I would like to know what cli tools I can use to manage Proxmox VE using command line? Where I can find a manual on Proxmox VE command line tools?

You can access the whole API using the 'pvesh' command. The API is documented at http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_VE_API and contains some examples howto use that. All other binaries have man pages.

4. Not really a problem or serious thing, but... is it really not possible to download a backup of the machine with web interface? I can easily do that with scp tool over ssh, but it is kinda strange that you can upload files via web interface, but can't easily download a copy of VM.

Download/upload backups on the GUI is a security problem, and we did not found a clean solution so far.

5. A thing that bugs me a little: Proxmox VE binds VNC consoles to external ip of the machine.

Our VNC connections use TLS, so we consider them quite secure (as secure as ssh).

 

[orenyny]

>>Download/upload backups on the GUI is a security problem, and we did not found a clean solution so far.

So, how do you actually use backups?

Thanks.

 

[tom]

Most times I store several backups on a NFS server and the files on the NFS servers went to a LTO tape drive day by day. the LTO tape are stored off-site.

in the very rare case of a restore I restore from tape to the NFS server - and then via Proxmox VE gui.

 

[diaolin]

Download/upload backups on the GUI is a security problem, and we did not found a clean solution so far.

True but if you do not expose the filesystem itself and use a cgi that incapsulates a stream
containing the right Content-Type
i think that it's not so unsecure as you think

Just for example; instead of exposing the file directly you can push it to the browser with a cgi.


Diaolin