Design recommendations - proxmox 4.2

[RST]

Hi,

After years of working with VMware and Hyper-V we have decided to use Proxmox for one of our smaller customers. Where the decision still is not final yet!

Available hardware:
3x Dell R430
- Dual Hexa Core (12 cores)
- 96GB RAM
- Hardware RAID+battery
- 1x 250GB SSD + 3x 1TB SSD
- 4x 10G networkcard

Note: No SAN or NAS is available

The environment needs to run:
3x PKI servers
1x proxy server
2x Next Generation Firewall VMs
5xWebserver (LAMP Stack, without heavy load)
5x ERP suite (heavy DB load)

Due to my lack of knowledge regarding distributed storage I am not sure what solution we possibly might use.

We need HA functionality for all virtual machines and are not planning to use the HA cluster for Containers or stream large amount of media.

What storage solution will suit the available hardware and purpose in the best way?

Thank you in advance,
RST

 

[mir]

Note: No SAN or NAS is available

Without shared storage you cannot have HA.

 

[RST]

Without shared storage you cannot have HA.

Thank you for your reply. But what about DR within the cluster? What storage solution would give us the best possible redundancy within the cluster? (maybe a cold copy? active-passive replication?)

E.g.:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/DRBD

"Ability to live migrate running machines without downtime in a few seconds WITHOUT the need of SAN (iSCSI, FC, NFS) as the data is already on both nodes."

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

You have the following option.
ceph
glusterfs

 

[finish06]

I would definitely recommend considering ceph. However, I would definitely want to have a subscription for the customer d/t the upcoming changes in Proxmox with the recent Hammer to Jewel upgrade. Also, "

pveceph install

does not run correctly due to changes on the ceph end. It is easy to overcome this though, just manually add the keys and repository. Then install ceph & ceph-common. Best of luck mate!

 

[RST]

Ceph seems to be a great solution. Nevertheless, would it preform with only 3 nodes, where each node has 3 disks?


Also, Mir mentioned that HA would only work with a SAN or NAS. DRBD documentations states a different story. How does DRBD fit in all of this?

 

[finish06]

Ceph seems to be a great solution. Nevertheless, would it preform with only 3 nodes, where each node has 3 disks?


Also, Mir mentioned that HA would only work with a SAN or NAS. DRBD documentations states a different story. How does DRBD fit in all of this?

Based upon my knowledge, however limited, if using ceph or glusterFS, you can definitely set up HA as long as you have duplicates of the data, e.g. set ceph duplication level to 3. Also, I would suspect you would be able to do ceph on a 3 node cluster with 1 SSD journal device (I would recommend Intel DC s3700) and 3 OSDs. I currently do it in my home environment without any issues or problems, however I have yet to have any single server down time so I am not sure how the software watch dog will respond.

 

[RobFantini]

I will be using ceph in the future and have a question their storage set up.

Is it true that ceph does better with non-raid cards? [ like LSI in IT mode ]