Cluster Balancing Load

[itNGO]

Hi,

coming from HyperV and SCVMM.... is there some logic inside Proxmox which allows for "balancing" VMs on Host-CPU or Disk I/O Workload?
Is something like this planned?

Reason: If whole cluster is online it would be nice if Guests are balanced so that CPU-Load is distributed for optimal performance of all guest.

Regards

 

[alexskysilk]

you can usually find answers if you search the forums.
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/load-balancing-and-future-features.54745/

 

[SOLTECSIS - Carles Munyoz]

You can use HAProxy too in your firewall for balance load over servers.

 

[itNGO]

you can usually find answers if you search the forums.
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/load-balancing-and-future-features.54745/

Yes, I knew this post, but thought after two years... there might be new views or progress about this.... other Virtualizations-Systems can....

 

[alexskysilk]

the proxmox devs have a very specific idea of their priorities. This isnt one of them.

 

[itNGO]

You can use HAProxy too in your firewall for balance load over servers.

Sure, but this only helps for same workload... but not to balance different Server across Cluster based on there specific workload....

 

[itNGO]

the proxmox devs have a very specific idea of their priorities. This isnt one of them.

What might make it difficult to use Proxmox in large scale datacenter where load needs to distributed automatic on fair use logic.... but that's another topic.....

 

[tjk]

Yea, VMware calls this DRS, Proxmox doesn't have this feature, right now it is a manual process by watching your performance stats for the node and each VM and manually making adjustments and moving VM's around the cluster when you find a hot spot.

There is a reason VMware is so expensive, DRS is one of those features enterprises pay dearly for.

Citrix also has this functionality with their Work Load Balancer VM that runs on the cluster and moves VM's around automatically too.

RedHat has this for RHEV/OVirt too, as well as MSFT with Hyper-V.

 

[alexskysilk]

What might make it difficult to use Proxmox in large scale datacenter where load needs to distributed automatic on fair use logic.... but that's another topic.....

I'm really conflicted about this.

DRS can really help, but just "set and forget" doesnt really work for all workloads, especially if you have large VMs. Getting actual utility from DRS requires some work and tuning.

If you understand what tuning is in this context, you can accomplish much the same using metrics collection and the proxmox API. Its not especially difficult. So the question is- what is your tolerance to understanding what your cluster is doing, and how much are you willing to pay/cede control to a third party to do it for you.

When I noted that the devs dont consider such automation is a priority, I didnt mean that I disagree with them.

 

[SOLTECSIS - Carles Munyoz]

Sure, but this only helps for same workload... but not to balance different Server across Cluster based on there specific workload....

It is possible to program checks that analyze the Proxmox nodes load and live migrate VMs, but I agree that it would be better if this feature were available in the virtual environment like other virtualization solutions do.

 

[gyptazy]

It is possible to program checks that analyze the Proxmox nodes load and live migrate VMs, but I agree that it would be better if this feature were available in the virtual environment like other virtualization solutions do.

Indeed, it is - and also now there is with ProxLB!

I had the same issues and wrote an opensource to have this in place:

https://github.com/gyptazy/ProxLB

 

[itNGO]

Indeed, it is - and also now there is with ProxLB!

I had the same issues and wrote an opensource to have this in place:

https://github.com/gyptazy/ProxLB

Looks good so far... testing on a 3 Node Cluster with 88 VMs and 25 CTs currently..... looks promising... balancing by CPU-Load would be nice, but I saw in GitHub, you are on it....

 

[gyptazy]

Looks good so far... testing on a 3 Node Cluster with 88 VMs and 25 CTs currently..... looks promising... balancing by CPU-Load would be nice, but I saw in GitHub, you are on it....

Thank you very much, really appreciate this! Happy to hear that it provides a value to the Proxmox community and its users to boost opensource products on the market.

Regarding your request, just change https://github.com/gyptazy/ProxLB/blob/main/proxlb.conf#L8 to "cpu" and restart the service (if running as service, depending in your setup).

 

[LnxBil]

Have you check cluster resource balancing? At the moment it gets only triggered after migration, yet it looks promising and they also state, that they do not want to do this automatically, yet maybe they're exposing the endpoint somehow that you could just trigger it and let PVE do the load balancing.