Multi-site federation - Would this be interesting for Proxmox ?
- Thread starter Hakan_k
- Start date
You should look into Proxmox Datacenter Manager for your unified view of multiple clusters. You can tie multiple sites together and at least manually start moving things between clusters. With a bit of setup, you can actually do what you want with minimal effort.
I think the largest problem in orchestration is that these are going to be very unique setups geared towards 1 business model. The way you define multi-site and the features you want may not be the way I view it.
For example, you want Ceph multi-site, there are at least 3 ways of doing that and which one to choose depends on both your sensitivity to downtime as well as latency between datacenters. In most cases you still need manual intervention when a datacenter site goes down, because maybe it’s just a temporary blip and maybe your application isn’t built to handle moving between datacenters easily, unless you have BGP to handle floating your IP addresses, which most customers won’t afford.
vCenter doesn’t have an extensive multi-site product, the closest you get is Linked Mode vCenter, but you have to arrange your own networking, security and storage. It’s an ambitious project, certainly feasible to implement today with existing Proxmox, I would suggest making a blueprint in something like Ansible using the PVE, PBS and PDM products and API. That’s how I ‘kind of’ have multi-site capabilities - I have 4 Proxmox Datacenters in 3 physically separate datacenters, one of which is pure DR/Backup - PBS backs up every VM at least once per hour and PBS itself is replicated back to another datacenter - if one of the sites ever burn down to the ground, we recover from one of the backups or if we know in advance (right now, we are moving out of one datacenter) we can use PDM to (live?) migrate to another datacenter, although we can’t really live-migrate because IP addresses would change, but at least, I can move VMs without forklifting the rack.
I think the largest problem in orchestration is that these are going to be very unique setups geared towards 1 business model. The way you define multi-site and the features you want may not be the way I view it.
For example, you want Ceph multi-site, there are at least 3 ways of doing that and which one to choose depends on both your sensitivity to downtime as well as latency between datacenters. In most cases you still need manual intervention when a datacenter site goes down, because maybe it’s just a temporary blip and maybe your application isn’t built to handle moving between datacenters easily, unless you have BGP to handle floating your IP addresses, which most customers won’t afford.
vCenter doesn’t have an extensive multi-site product, the closest you get is Linked Mode vCenter, but you have to arrange your own networking, security and storage. It’s an ambitious project, certainly feasible to implement today with existing Proxmox, I would suggest making a blueprint in something like Ansible using the PVE, PBS and PDM products and API. That’s how I ‘kind of’ have multi-site capabilities - I have 4 Proxmox Datacenters in 3 physically separate datacenters, one of which is pure DR/Backup - PBS backs up every VM at least once per hour and PBS itself is replicated back to another datacenter - if one of the sites ever burn down to the ground, we recover from one of the backups or if we know in advance (right now, we are moving out of one datacenter) we can use PDM to (live?) migrate to another datacenter, although we can’t really live-migrate because IP addresses would change, but at least, I can move VMs without forklifting the rack.
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About pdm, Disaster recovery is on the roadmap. Evpn central configuration is already available in 1.0. If you need other vpn mesh, they need to be added in pve sdn first