Proxmox VE popular in OVH Datacenters

[martin]

Which Operating System would you choose for your dedicated servers in the data-center?

OVH, the 4th world wide hosting provider and the leading European hosting provider, offers 90 operating systems and the most popular distributions for virtualization. Guess what distribution for virtualization got a high user count at OVH?

Here are some nice graphics with details, recently published by OVH

Europe
http://www.ovh.de/images/newsletter/012014/infographie-distrib-de.jpg
(Figures based on an analysis of operating systems installed on all servers leased by OVH in Europe in September 2013.)

North America
http://www.ovh.de/images/newsletter/012014/infographie-distrib-en.jpg
(Figures based on an analysis of operating systems installed on all servers leased by OVH.com in North America in September 2013.)

Almost 90% choose a Linux distribution in Europe and Proxmox is the 5th choice for users! OVH provides a ready-to-use Proxmox image since more than 5 years which allows you to start immediately with the installation and configuration of your virtual machines.

For more information on OVH view http://www.proxmox.com/partners/hosting-partner

__________________
Best regards,

Martin Maurer
Proxmox VE project leader

 

[ebony]

I use Proxmox on my Kim server @ Ovh.

Though it only runs back end stuff now i have moved to a new data center that's support proxmox as a OS as well. Just they give ip's on there low end systems.

 

[ehabh]

Which data center is taht ebony? I found the new hosting seriies of ovh amazing value for money given that they give you LOADS of free ips ( only setup cost for 16+32ips on entry level )

 

[ebony]

Which data center is taht ebony? I found the new hosting seriies of ovh amazing value for money given that they give you LOADS of free ips ( only setup cost for 16+32ips on entry level )

Online.net i got a Dedibox® SC Gen2 and a Dedibox® LT 16G

i like ovh and there good for there top end stuff but my server are just for a "lab" so nothing hardcore running on them but ovh does give nice ram that would be nice. but online has helped me a few times with proxmox.

hetzner on the other hand does not support proxmox so if something goes wrong your on your own. so i did not stay with them for long.

 

[ehabh]

I also use online.net but for backups only. Their secondary network card might help in doing proxmox HA though, but that needs a lot of experimentation before I feel confident with it

 

[ekl]

Hello there,
my first post/question in this forum so please do not hit me too hard =)

I landed on this forum page googling, gathering info about installing proxmox on my SoYouStart server (soyoustart is kinda OVH mid-range dedicated server line), but actually my server has only a software raid, and I just discovered thanks to various posts and questions in this same forum that proxmox doesn't support software raid; while I clearly see that proxmox is available for install in my SYS/OVH admin panel, I'm wondering: "how?"

I can't understand how one of the leading hosting provider in Europe may offer an unsafe solution as available by default, so I'm wondering if the problem has been solved on new versions of proxmox, or there is a fix/patch/fork/whatever applied on OVH's proxmox version (they offer version 3.3), or they just don't care and offer an unstable/unsafe configuration

Pretty sure someone here knows something more than me (not hard, I'm a newbie on both proxmox and ovh), or can at least give some suggestions about a good configuration that would eventually be stable for a production server (not critical stuff, but the server will host services that can/should run for years, 24/7, so..)

NOTE: I may be wrong, but my guess is that knowing more about this situation could generally be helpful for many users that may want to use proxmox on OVH servers not equipped with hardware raid; since looks like it's going to became less and less uncommon because OVH+proxmox is a spreading solution, it would be good to have some informations available in proxmox's official forum, instead of a bunch of disappointed users asking help for unstable workarounds on OVH's forum in a more-or-less near future

Thanks in advance for helping

 

[PaulVM]

I am not a guru, but know a little of Proxmox and OVH.
Proxmox support hardware RAID. It doesn't supply support for software raid.
You can install Proxmox to a single disk and next convert it to a RAID software configuration (I did it in 1.x, 2.x and 3.x (more complicated with GPT ...).
OVH simply modify the installation script and install directly to a sw RAID .
In my opinion an interesting option that can be considered to be inserted as standard in Proxmox for people that install it in low end servers, but developers are more focuses to high end systems and for an Enterprise distro a supported RAID ctrl is normal.
I use Proxmox as base distro for many servers that do light tasks (small LAN samba, mail, ...), and usually install in RAID sw if there isn't a RAID ctrl or if it isn't supported.
No problems until now. Works as expected.

Paul

 

[ekl]

Many thanks PaulVM, while your reply has been very quick, in the meantime I tried installing using the SoYouStart admin panel and found myself on a working Proxmox 3.3 + softraid system, some friends talked about issues with snapshots when using softraid, but I guess I'll just try and see what happens; looks like as of today, the main issue I'm having with SYS is lack of docs about theirs setup (but, usually, OVH guides apply to SYS configuration too)

my next goal is learning proxmox basics (snapshots, for example) ad more!

Thanks again

 

[Tipika]

A few years ago the softraid mod made by ovh was very unstable. If you updated the distribution at that time, the system was unbootable
Right now it works, I just updated from 3.3 to 3.4 on SYS softraid and it was working well

 

[fortechitsolutions]

Hi, I just wanted to ad a few footnotes tho this thread. Sorry if this is obsolete or not of interest.

I've used proxmox for >5 years in a variety of scenarios. I don't pretend to speak for the developers, but my general observations around the topic of software raid:

-- it is not officially supported
-- but it can be made to work, via a number of ways, assuming you are good at building software raid configs and don't mind fussing around with it a bit. And then of course your endpoint is a "non-supportable" config of proxmox, ie, meaning that you can assume any automatic version-upgrade-scripts and so forth - will not work in future.
-- I believe, core reason for this from developer team is simply, "HW Raid is easier to support, often gives better performance, and end of the day we have limited resources to support things, so it is a design decision which we have made".
-- this isn't to say that they have built timebombs into proxmox which will cause it to break if you run it on linux sw raid just that they want to be very clear, it is not an officially supported config.
-- that also being said: Things changed a bit in recent years, with addition of ZFS support to the core of proxmox, it now does support a form of software raid, ie, ZFS based.
-- Also for reference: I have over the last few years deployed a number of hosts with OVH data centre in ~Montreal region, which are running Proxmox based on the pre-config template that OVH makes available. This config is 'out of the box' doing SW Raid, and it requires no customization or fussy human admin work to make it work. You just choose "Proxmox" from the distro pick list when deploying your host; wait a few minutes while their deployment engine gets the image pushed to the bare metal; and at the end of it all -- you have a lovely proxmox host up and running, on top of software raid, and from a usability perspective, it just works and you don't have to do any special effort.
-- I have used these hosts for a few years, for a few different client projects, and they just work. I've never had any problems with stability, performance, etc.

So. IMHO SW raid and proxmox continues to be one of 'those topics',
-- you can do it if you want to, but you should be mindful of what you are doing. Not for newbies IMHO (except - just fine if you do it as a learning experience and fine if you 'really' want to and know what you are doing.
-- OVH have a pre-cooked template that makes it easy to do, on their platform, if you wish.
-- it is still technically not a supported config in core proxmox (in terms of upgrade paths or 'reasonable expectation for support on topic via support team, forum based or official ticket based').


Hope this helps give a tiny bit of relevant info.

Tim


--------------------------------------
Tim Chipman
Fortech I.T. Solutions
http://FortechITSolutions.ca