Does Proxmox fits my organization needs?

[Yan369]

Hello,

With my organization, we're looking to replace our virtualization infrastructure. Until now, we were running a dozen of xen project servers, hosting around 70 vm's in total. It worked so far without major issues, but we're lacking the global view of our resources that a Proxmox cluster seems to offer. It happens quite regularly that we have to check all our physical servers to find out on which one that specific vm is running.

For that purpose, it seems Proxmox is the ideal tool, according to my readings, is that right?

Is there a simple way to migrate our xen vm's into Proxmox?

If needed, would it be possible to move a vm to a service like Amazon/Azure/whatever suitable offsite service ?

Some of our providers are working with Docker. What would be the best way to run those containers with Proxmox?

Thanks for your consideration. I might have more questions later, it's an important decision we have to make, and we want to be sure to chose the right tool for the right purpose.

Yannick.

 

[oguz]

hi,

For that purpose, it seems Proxmox is the ideal tool, according to my readings, is that right?

indeed, the web GUI gives a very good overview of what is where. also the whole cluster can be managed by logging into one node.

Is there a simple way to migrate our xen vm's into Proxmox?

you can take a look here [0].

If needed, would it be possible to move a vm to a service like Amazon/Azure/whatever suitable offsite service ?

that's not in our scope, but i suppose you can always export/convert and transfer the vm disk images (can also be scripted for example)

Some of our providers are working with Docker. What would be the best way to run those containers with Proxmox?

PVE uses linux containers (LXC) out of the box. we don't officially support docker setups on the hypervisor, usually we suggest to run docker in its own VM. any linux VM with enough resources should suffice here.

hope this helps

[0]: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE

 

[Yan369]

Hello Oguz, thank you for your quick reply.

you can take a look here https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE

If I'm not mistaken, your link is about migrating from Citrix's Xenserver, but we're using pure open source Xen Project. Right now we are using paravirtualized guests which are booted via pygrub (with LVM as storage). That's one of the reasons we want to migrate, no one is using Xen Project anymore, and we're stranded alone on our island.

that's not in our scope, but i suppose you can always export/convert and transfer the vm disk images (can also be scripted for example)

What if we were to rent one ore more server(s) somewhere offsite, connect them to our network by some means (vpn, direct connexion, whatever) and install a Proxmox node on it, could it work? That might sound like dumb questions, but I'm only discovering all features available.

Best regards.

 

[oguz]

If I'm not mistaken, your link is about migrating from Citrix's Xenserver, but we're using pure open source Xen Project. Right now we are using paravirtualized guests which are booted via pygrub (with LVM as storage). That's one of the reasons we want to migrate, no one is using Xen Project anymore, and we're stranded alone on our island.

i don't know much about the export capabilities of xenproject (though i found this so it's probably possible [0]), but if you can export the VM disk as either raw, vmdk or qcow2 formats, you should be able to import the disks in PVE.

What if we were to rent one ore more server(s) somewhere offsite, connect them to our network by some means (vpn, direct connexion, whatever) and install a Proxmox node on it, could it work? That might sound like dumb questions, but I'm only discovering all features available.

it can work, but if you cluster those machines the vpn might create a bottleneck in cluster communication. with a fast enough internet connection it might not matter though. take a look at here for more information on clustering [1], especially the network [2] section.

for (on-premise or off-site) backup capabilities you can also take a look at Proxmox Backup Server [3], which integrates with PVE and adds capabilities like deduplicated backups, dirty bitmaps of running VMs and other cool features.


[0]: https://xapi-project.github.io/xen-api/importexport.html
[1]: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvecm.htm
[2]: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvecm.html#pvecm_cluster_network_requirements
[3]: https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/introduction.html#main-features