Promox Design / Dell Powerstore / Pure Storage

[Adelscott]

Hello everyone,

Like everyone else, I'm looking to switch to Proxmox for my production environment.

I'm considering implementing the following architecture:




My question is, does the metro volume work with Proxmox under Dell PowerStore?

Same question, but with Pure Storage arrays and active cluster mode.

Best regards,

 

[alexskysilk]

The more impactful factor would be how you would quorum and manage PVE across a stretch configuration. PVE doesn't have any provisions for this, and you would need to deploy some kind of stonith at the first layer cluster (with pve clusters being the second.) If you can have that addressed the storage part would just work. It can be done, but not as part of the PVE toolset.

 

[bbgeek17]

My question is, does the metro volume work with Proxmox under Dell PowerStore?

Looking at the documentation, the Metro Volume operates in active/active mode across both sites, allowing concurrent reads and writes. From PVE perspective, it has no awareness of this underlying behavior. If you stretch your PVE cluster across both sites, the Metro Volume will simply appear as a shared LVM volume to Proxmox.

In this setup, PVE treats the Metro Volume as any other block device - it's just an application using shared storage.

The primary concern, as @alexskysilk pointed out, is the risk of split-brain. While Dell does implement certain safeguards to mitigate this, their documentation mentions the possibility of requiring manual recovery in failure scenarios.

There are simply too many variables to predict how successful you will be in recovering from a worst-case situation.

Thoroughly test failure scenarios before moving to production. If you didn't test it - assume it is broken.

---

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[LnxBil]

If you didn't test it - assume it is broken.

That should be on tshirts and hammered into the brains of all mankind.

 

[Adelscott]

Hello,

Yes, split brain, whether in Proxmox, VMware, or HyperV, will be there.
It must be as secure as possible, tested, validated, and fully understood.

Thank you all.

 

[Carlos Gomes]

sorry in advance if not related to this topic, but - https://github.com/kolesa-team/pve-purestorage-plugin

passed through this "community plugin" to integrate purestorage to pve, as today pve do not have a proper way to setup the multipath storage directly without LVM / split-brain caveats on the mix.

For now we are using ovirt only because of its support of the bulk storages, and trying to migrate to proxmox as it offers more resources for our environment, but how to fully integrate the power and resources of purestorage is still a challenge as its way expensive to discard.

warding here to follow the discussion of this storage integrations

 

[LnxBil]

We're currently discussing a similar setup to this.

Yes, split brain, whether in Proxmox, VMware, or HyperV, will be there.
It must be as secure as possible, tested, validated, and fully understood.

What did you conclude?

The primary concern, as @alexskysilk pointed out, is the risk of split-brain. While Dell does implement certain safeguards to mitigate this, their documentation mentions the possibility of requiring manual recovery in failure scenarios.

AFAIK, the two PowerStores need a witness, as shown in the network topology diagram. This is linux based and could also host a QDevice for running the PVE cluster.

In case of a failure of the direct communication between the two metro nodes, the witness will give the prefered location of the metro volume a heads up and if it replies in time, the non-preferred site will be disconnected and will go offline, so if you're running a kind of streched cluster, it may be a good idea to have metro volumes, one preferred on each side and run the VMs on that site on the preferred metro volume. With this, you will have - if you stricktly split the domains - no outage if the connection will fail. This may be a bit strange, because this kind of not uses the active-active paradigm, but I fear that this is what you meant with the problems of this setup. In the time between the network outage occurs and the non-winning side is disconnected, you may already have a split brain of your data. This can IMHO only be mitigated by using the system as non-active-active.

(Another option would be to have a network ring configured between the three datacenters, if the latency is low enough. You could then route the traffic over the witness path.)

What are your thoughts on this?

 

[ammar94]

Hi @Adelscott , I'm planning to set up a design similar to yours. May I ask if Proxmox is compatible and works well with Metronode and PowerStore?