Looking for advice | beginner learning | HA Cluster

[halb9]

Hello beautiful internet people,

I'm seeking out to you to get a bit of advice. I'm running Proxmox at home as well as in a sports club where I help with IT related stuff. So far so good.
I'm a fulltime sysadmin by day and I got my hands on a bit of equipment which I like to use as test environment. It is pretty mixed but you take what you can get

My goal is to learn more about HA Cluster with an attached storage in Proxmox.

My test equipment so far consists of:

Fujitsu Siemens RX 300 S7
- Dual Xeon E5-2650 2.0Ghz
- RAID1 73GB SAS 15k
- 256GB ECC RAM

Fujitsu Siemens RX300 S7
- Dual Xeon E5-2650 2.0Ghz
- RAID1 73GB SAS 15k
- 256GB ECC RAM

Fujitsu Siemens RX300 S8
- Dual Xeon E5-2650 @ 2.6Ghz
- RAID1 73GB SAS 15k
- 256GB ECC RAM

HP Microserver Gen8
- Xeon E3-1220L v2
- 1x 64GB SDD on ODD SATA Port
- 4x 120GB SSD via regular SATA Controller
- 16GB ECC RAM

some HPE Gbit switches and CAT6 cables.

To be honest I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the different options and possibilities regarding HA Cluster and storage types.

All I can say at this point is I'm not planning to run heavy loaded database instances. And in general I don't care so much for speed or optimal performance. At least for now.
I'm more interested in the general principle.

I've already read about ZFS, FreeNAS, Ceph, just to through in some buzzwords. But given the above equipment I'm looking for some guidelines for what makes sense to try out.

I would be happy if you could help me out with the very first basics like

- What questions should I ask myself?
- What makes sense at what time?

This sort of thing.

Thank you very much. I appreciate your time!

Have a nice day

halb9

 

[guletz]

Hi,

- What questions should I ask myself?

It is a smart question, if you ask me The first step is to make a plan:
- what VM/CT I will run
- what downtime is acceptable for your enviroment(VM/CT/Proxmox nodes)
- where and how you will make backups/restore(retention period)
- what kind of network I will use and related(switches, bonding, Internet)
- firewalls and access rules(for VM/CT and Proxmox nodes)

Bescuase you do not have 10Gb switches, as may others say on this Forum, Ceph will not be a option!
By the way, what kind of DataBase you will be run(with what .... load , like 60% disk read and 40% disk write)?

Good luck!

 

[halb9]

Hi juletz,

thanks for your answer.

- what VM/CT I will run

Pretty much only VM. No CT.

- what downtime is acceptable for your enviroment(VM/CT/Proxmox nodes)

As this is a test environment there is no definitive answer here. However goal of my learning experience here is what I can reasonably expect from such setup to make a better informed decision in the future.

- where and how you will make backups/restore(retention period)

Is this a question I should ask myself BEFORE I do my testing? I thought I get familiar with the HA Setup first and worry about the backup later.

- what kind of network I will use and related(switches, bonding, Internet)

Like I said in my initial posting I have some HPE Gbit switches at hand. I thought using those for my experiment. As the HP Microserver has two Gbit interfaces I think I would like to hook up this machine with the given ports. Therefore ZFS over iSCSI is an option?

- firewalls and access rules(for VM/CT and Proxmox nodes)

no idea yet

Bescuase you do not have 10Gb switches, as may others say on this Forum, Ceph will not be a option!

ok oO

By the way, what kind of DataBase you will be run(with what .... load , like 60% disk read and 40% disk write)?

See my original post. I'm not planning to run any database. Just some plain boring "standard" VMs. Windows Server, Linux with Webservers etc.
It is after all just so I can learn about Proxmox. I don't mind if I don't come out with the most performant maschine.

 

[guletz]

Therefore ZFS over iSCSI is an option?

It could be!