HA Enterpise

[scontin]

Given the costs associated with competitors, more and more companies are considering Proxmox.

But as things stand - aside from Blockbridge and Ceph (the latter being hard to recommend nowadays due to prohibitive disk costs) - are there enterprise-grade solutions available for new infrastructure deployments that guarantee stability, High Availability (HA), and snapshots?

Everyone would like at least the same guarantees as the classic nodes+SAN model..

 

[bbgeek17]

Hi @scontin,

Thanks for the mention! You're right, hardware cost is a real problem right now, and flash isn't getting cheaper anytime soon.

I know you asked about options beyond Blockbridge, but this seemed worth mentioning. What we're seeing is that for many shops, reusing the SAN they already own is a practical short-term strategy. That's exactly what we've been working on: improved support for running existing enterprise SANs behind Blockbridge, with native Proxmox snapshots, clones, and HA. This allows folks to migrate seamlessly to NVMe when prices come down, without changing their Proxmox workflows.

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Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[UdoB]

Ceph (the latter being hard to recommend nowadays due to prohibitive disk costs)

Is it?

I am running ZFS only. On mirrors, of course. Five nodes --> 10 disks. (Minimum, actually there are many more - but for simplicity...)

Every VM being replicated to all five nodes means that each and every byte is stored on 10 physical drives.

Utilizing Ceph with five nodes and the default rule "three copies, two minimum" only three copies would be stored --> three times the amount of space available = one third of costs.

 

[J-Rod]

You definitely don't want to make sweeping generalizations, especially about cost, because there are many ways to solve various problems.

For example, if you are a Windows shop you can get Windows Server 2025 Datacenter OEM licenses on eBay for under $100 (16/24/48 cores) which allows unlimited Windows VMs, and then you also have the free Windows Admin Center software which allows you manage it all via a single web GUI.

Enterprise-grade iSCSI SAN hardware is easy to find used on eBay and is a great value.

Older hardware does frequently have the problem of higher power utilization. But I think the 3-7 year age range is still reasonable.

There are also other costs involved such as balancing risk and downtime for workers and customers, and I think that is why there are still plenty of people paying a high price for proven solutions, such as vSphere, Nutanix, etc.