New user recommendations please

[Faris Raouf]

Hi,

I'm about to start on my Proxmox journey very soon. I'll be switching from Virtuozzo 4.7 Containers.

We will have two brand new Dell servers with SSDs (in RAID10) for this. We will be running a number of Centos 7 VEs (running Plesk 200-300 domains per VE), plus some smaller VEs or Containers.

I don't intend trying to migrate the Virtuozzo Containers directly to Proxmox. As most of these are running Plesk, I'll do a Plesk migration to a fresh VE under Proxmox. I don't know what to do about the non-Plesk Containers we currently have, but that's a different topic.

For now, I'm mostly interested in installation/configuration of Proxmox.

I've experimented in general with 5.1, and have happily created a cluster of two machines using old decommissioned servers. I did nothing special -- I accepted all the default options. It all seemed to work as expected.

I was wondering if anybody had any installation/configuration tips for a setup like I will have, that would make things better for me? I have so little experience with Proxmox, and I know some of you having been using it for many, many years.

One of the things that seems obvious is to use VEs not Containers. I don't mind the performance hit. I'm more concerned about stability and reliability and security. Is this a sensible decision?

Is there a particular filesystem setup that would be recommended?

What else should I think about or look at in terms of setup/configuration?

Those of you with lots of experience must, I'm sure, have some wonderful tips that might help me?


Thank you!

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

One of the things that seems obvious is to use VEs not Containers. I don't mind the performance hit. I'm more concerned about stability and reliability and security. Is this a sensible decision?

I don't know what you mean with VE?
Proxmox VE means "Virtual Environment"
and PVE has support for KVM (full virtualization)[1] and LXC (operation level virtualization) [2]

Is there a particular filesystem setup that would be recommended?

With a two node, I would go with ZFS, because you have the most features with acceptable resource requirements.

1.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_virtualization
2.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating-system-level_virtualization

 

[Faris Raouf]

Thank you Wolfgang. Terminology is important and I got it wrong.
I mean using KVM for the new environments, as opposed to LCX.

I have never used ZFS is production. A quick read-up seems to indicate that when used with a hardware RAID card it might be sub-optimal, since ZFS is good at handling RAID itself. But I would be very, very nervous about this, because I am such a new user of Proxmox, let alone ZFS. It seems it is also heavy on RAM, and we will be limited to 64GB per node, and we need to make use of as much of it as we can.

We do need to do backups, and we do need them to be good and fast, and ZFS does this well, it seems. And we need reliability, and ZFS does this well too...but really, if it is a bad idea with a hardware RAID controller, I'm not sure I'm ready for it. At least not yet.

Yes, I know I'm being a coward, but at the moment I'm scared of the unknown and I'm scared of risk. I'm sure I will recover and get my confidence back, but right now I don't have any at all.