Confusion regarding shared storage

[unni]

Hi ,

I am new to proxmox. So pardon me if my question is meaningless.

I have installed proxmox on two of my servers and created a cluster using both of them . I read from the documentation that, I need to setup shared storage to enable live migration. The servers that I have installed proxmox have plenty of disk space. If I am planning to use NFS as shared storage, Do I need to create NFS shares in both the servers or do I need to choose a different server to create shared NFS share?

Is NFS good to implement in a production environment?


I have checked SolusVM before. In that, there is option to select IP address from pool while provisioning a new VM. In Proxmox, I cant find that option. IP address is not configured by default in the VMs in proxmox. Please shed some light on this.


Regards,
Unni

 

[unni]

Somebody please reply.

 

[JambaFun]

The point of shared storage is having vm data outside of the proxmox host. For educational purposes nfs on one of your two machines will probaboy work.

 

[dswartz]

The reason shared storage is essential for migration is that if you don't have it, migration could take minutes (or hours), since it will have to move N GB of storage, instead of a much smaller amount of ram and other state.

 

[unni]

The reason shared storage is essential for migration is that if you don't have it, migration could take minutes (or hours), since it will have to move N GB of storage, instead of a much smaller amount of ram and other state.

Hi,

So, I need to power up a third server for storage. correct?

 

[dswartz]

That would be the recommended way, yes. It's sometimes possible to have a hypervisor use storage on a virtualized appliance on that same hypervisor. Whether it works (robustly) depends on the hypervisor. ESXi works fine for that. Xenserver not so much. Can't speak to proxmox.

 

[silbro]

Yes you should use a shared storage on a separate server.

You can most likely make an NFS share on Proxmox itself because it is a Debian, but don't do that. For learning it could be ok, but even then I wouldn't recommend it because you would want to learn what you can use later on. There is also an option called DRBD where you can make a "RAID over the network". A great option is CEPH, but for that you need at least 3 Servers and it is recommended to have a lot of disks (around 24+ spinning disks or SSDs for journaling in combination with spinning disks). There are also other options. To start off though NFS is probably the easiest.

What exactly do you want to do?

 

[m.ardito]

I read from the documentation that, I need to setup shared storage to enable live migration.

true

Is NFS good to implement in a production environment?

you can have several types of shared storages (aka network storages) in proxmox.
About NFS, if you have a reliable and capable NFS server is good to use in production, too.

see http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage_Model

on this wiki page you'll see that some storage will not support hosting files but only partitions.
eg: on NFS storage you can store files, so your vm using that storage could have disks in qcow2, .vmdk, .RAW. those files will be used by qemu to represent your vmìs disk, so your vm's filesystem will be "inside" of them
while if you're using LVM/ISCSI there you can only use RAW disks: an LVM LV becomes your virtual disk, you must use directly as your vm's disk, so LV will contain directly your vm's filesystem.

I have checked SolusVM before. In that, there is option to select IP address from pool while provisioning a new VM. In Proxmox, I cant find that option. IP address is not configured by default in the VMs in proxmox. Please shed some light on this.

afaik, proxmox ve has not (yet?) ip pools. Once you create a vm you have to assign it a network card and then boot the vm, and from inside its OS configure the network card, with IP etc.
if you wish the vm to get a dynamic address from a pool, you could use a dhcp server on the same lan (even a vm dhcp server)

Marco

 

[unni]

Hi all,

now, I am getting a connection timed out error when I select the shared node (nfs) in the web interface. I am sure that I havent made any changes. How can I fix this?

root@proxmox:~# pvecm nodesNode Sts Inc Joined Name
1 M 12 2015-02-04 14:01:43 proxmox
2 X 40 proxmox2

root@proxmox2:~# pvecm nodes Node Sts Inc Joined Name
1 X 40 proxmox
2 M 4 2015-02-04 13:46:09 proxmox2