Host Configuration - Proxmox VE Deployment at Scale

[Kilstein]

Hello all!

TL;DR - Question: Does Proxmox have a native concept of VMware Host Profiles? Which is the ability to have a 'template' configuration to apply to multiple Proxmox VE hosts at scale. Desired state concept.

Details:
15+ year user of VMware here wanting to expand my horizons and deploying Proxmox in my 3 node home lab to immerse myself!

In VMware we have the concept of Host Profiles. It's basically a "template" that you can apply to your ESXi hosts to ensure they all match. So you can configure a single host, make it a Host Profile template, then apply it to other hosts so they all match.

I have been looking for a way to do this for Proxmox, for my small 3 node cluster, but also thinking what about a large scale deployment! What if you had 10, 20, 100 Proxmox VE hosts!

I see people using Terraform and Ansible as possible solutions, but not finding anything that is Proxmox native.

Examples: Things that i'd like to configure and make a template to apply to all matching hosts:

• Repository (Subscription or No Subscription)
• Enable PCI Passthrough (IOMMU)
  • nano /etc/default/grub
• Network Stack
  • Configure NIC Teaming
  • Enable VLAN Aware on
  • SDN (Actually this might be environment wide since its configured at the data center layer?)
    • VLAN Zone
    • VNets attached to VLAN Zone
  • NFS Shares (ISO, VM Storage, etc)
• Others

Thanks all! Excited to be here and join the Proxmox Community!

 

[cheiss]

Hi,

such things as profiles are not really a thing with Proxmox VE
Proxmox VE is just Debian underneath, so you can use any tool for configuring Linux/Debian hosts you want.

As for PVE-specific functionality (you e.g. mention networking), either the extensive REST API can be used directly or e.g. directly our the CLI tools.
The API covers everything you need to configure networking, guests, cluster management, storage, etc.

There are a lot of tools out there, most people tend to indeed use Ansible for host configuration, and either Ansible or Terraform/OpenTofu for guest management. There are also some community-made plugins for each of those.
But there really isn't a one-size-fits-it-all solution, but that's also an advantage - it means that you will never hit a situation where you can't configure something the way you would like.

Just to mention it here, a auto-installer is also currently it the works, which will enable to easily install & pre-configure fleets of any size.

 

[Kilstein]

Hi,

such things as profiles are not really a thing with Proxmox VE
Proxmox VE is just Debian underneath, so you can use any tool for configuring Linux/Debian hosts you want.

As for PVE-specific functionality (you e.g. mention networking), either the extensive REST API can be used directly or e.g. directly our the CLI tools.
The API covers everything you need to configure networking, guests, cluster management, storage, etc.

There are a lot of tools out there, most people tend to indeed use Ansible for host configuration, and either Ansible or Terraform/OpenTofu for guest management. There are also some community-made plugins for each of those.
But there really isn't a one-size-fits-it-all solution, but that's also an advantage - it means that you will never hit a situation where you can't configure something the way you would like.

Just to mention it here, a auto-installer is also currently it the works, which will enable to easily install & pre-configure fleets of any size.

Thank you for the reply and context!

Also thank you for the mention of Auto-Installer in the works! I'll definitely be checking that out! I think that has huge value for the traditional VMware shop looking at migrating to Proxmox, but even Proxmox at scale native!