Is it safe to cold shut down?

[ozgurerdogan]

Sometimes remote hands at datacenter might be needed. And instead of shutting down server after stopping vms and waiting for staff to do things which ends up longer downtime, can I let staff at datacenter simply pressing power button and shut down server for less downtime when they are ready.

Would this cause proxmox crush or something?

 

[Dunuin]

Depends on what action is setup in BIOS when pressing the power button. If its just causing a ACPI shutdown then this would be fine as PVE will first try to gracefully shutdown all guests before shutting down itself. Only if a guest won't shutdown in time (I think timeout was 3 or 5 minutes) PVE will forcefully stop the guest.

 

[ozgurerdogan]

Guys at dc will probably long press power button and will cause proxmox sudden shut down like unpluging power cable.

 

[leesteken]

Most datacenters have redundant power because they don't want a sudden power loss. I think the same reasons for that apply to unplugging your Proxmox host...
Proxmox is not designed for instant shutdown. Fortunately, you can easily make backups and restore to a new installation. Moreover, Proxmox (and its storage) can run clustered (with and without HA) and can handle the loss of less than half of the machines in the cluster.

 

[Neobin]

In the forum regularly threads come up with corrupted filesystems after a power outage.

I strongly doubt, that the risk for a corrupted filesystem and the downtime trying to recover from it and a potential data loss is worth it.

As leesteken mentioned, if you need more uptime, you should go for a cluster.

 

[ozgurerdogan]

What is easiest cluster option you suggest?

 

[tom]

In the forum regularly threads come up with corrupted filesystems after a power outage.

This happens if you use desktop hardware for servers.

E.g. if you use the very recommended datacenter class SSD/NVMe with Powerloss protection, your filesystem will stay save.

There are reasons why datacenter SSD/NVMe provides this and why this is a bit more expensive.

 

[ozgurerdogan]

You are right but desktop hardwares are not bad lately. And if backups are in safe place, it is ok to use them. I guess many DCs are using desktop hardwares also.

 

[tom]

You are right but desktop hardwares are not bad lately. And if backups are in safe place, it is ok to use them. I guess many DCs are using desktop hardwares also.

depends on what you need.

if your data is important (its always ...), you cannot afford dataloss.

I am aware that hosting companies are selling desktops as servers, but this does not mean that this is the best choice.

If you do not have power loss protection, you will loose the data in the caches on powerloss. Worst case, your OS is corrupted and cannot boot. Or important user data is corrupted. This can be even more dangerous as you do not notice this in the first run.

So my general recommendation for server use: Use server grade hardware, never desktop systems. never.