Proxmox Capabilities

[Zero_1]

Hi all,

First time posting and some what new to the product. Heard about it a lot and might be considering it for our office environment as we have legacy servers from a datacenter we can leverage. I had some questions but I will give some info of our environment:

- Currently have 2 ESXI 6.0 servers
- NO failover/HA/clustering happening
- Running out of resources/drive space
- 8 legacy R730xd servers came from our datacenters we can utilize for office environment

Looking to achieve:

- Clustering/HA/Failover
- VSAN capabilities

Questions:
1) Does proxmox do SSD caching? We have a lot of SSD drives (enterprise grade) and wanted to utilize them with a RAID 6 config.
2) Can proxmox be installed on SD cards like vmware can? Is this recommended?
3) Does proxmox support a VSAN capabilities where all the servers in a cluster are pooled together for a large sum of resources?

Thanks to all who assist in answering these inquiries.

 

[Dunuin]

2) Can proxmox be installed on SD cards like vmware can? Is this recommended?

No. It will shred them in no time because it writes too much.

1) Does proxmox do SSD caching? We have a lot of SSD drives (enterprise grade) and wanted to utilize them with a RAID 6 config.
3) Does proxmox support a VSAN capabilities where all the servers in a cluster are pooled together for a large sum of resources?

Have a look at ceph which is supported by PVE: https://ceph.io/en/discover/technology/

 

[Zero_1]

So ceph is the equivalent to VSAN on the open source front?

Also if the VM's need to be exported from ESXi 6, is it possible? I saw 6.7 in an article.

 

[vashvampir]

So ceph is the equivalent to VSAN on the open source front?

It's totally different technologies, but usage is same. vSAN and Ceph are distributed network storages)

Also if the VM's need to be exported from ESXi 6, is it possible? I saw 6.7 in an article.

Yes, it is possible, but there may be difficulties with drivers for the OS, since vmware and proxmox are based on different virtualization technologies.
UPD. In practice, I encountered difficulties with importing OVA templates from vmware to proxmox, it was often easier to create new virtual machines with the same characteristics and import disks into them

 

[vashvampir]

No. It will shred them in no time because it writes too much.

wolfgang wrote in Oct 20, 2017: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-on-sd-card.37563/post-184855

Hi,

@kobuki We write per day without optimization about 10GB. Now you can consider if you SQL on you Raspberry-PI have the same load.

Dell as an 100% over provisioned SD what will wear about 500 write cycles per cell.
This would reach the theoretically ware out of a 16GB SD card in 600 days.

write intensive dir are
/var/log
/var/lib/pve-cluster

Also if HA is not needed you can turnoff pve-ha-lrm and pve-ha-crm to reduce writes.

In theory, you can move partitions that proxmox actively writes to on a separate disk, or in tmpfs. To do this, the truth will need a lot of experience in working with Linux, so as not to break anything.

 

[Dunuin]

Biggest problem are the write amplification of flash storage and missing wear leveling of SD cards/thumb drives. Especially when using ZFS for redunancy with its massive overhead of the boot/system disks.

 

[Zero_1]

Can we replicate proxmox VM's between two datacenters like VMware SRM?
Is it possible to integrate a opensource visualization dashboard like Grafana, prometheus, kibana etc...
Does proxmox have a scaling limitation?
Does proxmox support network teaming/bonding for VLT/stacking?

 

[Dunuin]

Can we replicate proxmox VM's between two datacenters like VMware SRM?

Not yet but it is worked on.

Does proxmox support network teaming/bonding for VLT/stacking?

PVE is a full linux distro based on Debian 11. So it supports all the bonding like LACP that linux offers.

Is it possible to integrate a opensource visualization dashboard like Grafana, prometheus, kibana etc...
Does proxmox have a scaling limitation?

If it runs on Debian it will run on PVE. External Graphite and InfluxDB are supported out of the box.

 

[Zero_1]

Did they state a timeline for when the next release will have replication of VM's?

 

[Dunuin]

Maybe later this year as an experimental feature according to here: Post in thread 'Multi Datacenter Management' https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/multi-datacenter-management.66830/post-469489

 

[Zero_1]

VMware does a software raid for its VSAN functions, should proxmox do a hardware raid and the initialize the disk or do a software raid?

 

[Dunuin]

For Ceph you want a HBA without any HW raid capabilities.

 

[Zero_1]

For Ceph you want a HBA without any HW raid capabilities.

Sorry I am not fimiliar with this HBA acronym, what does that stand for?

 

[Dunuin]

HBA = Host Bus Adapter. You want your disk controller as dumb as possible. So a HBA in IT-mode (initiator target mode) where the OS can directly access the discs without any abstraction layer, like raid or cacheing, in between.