quorum

[Scifibob]

This is a word that I did not know about before, but learned to hate.
It means that your Proxmox system needs another person or device to accept changes to your configuration.

It may make some meaning in the US where most people are paranoid of changes, and trust is a city in the USSR.
But here in europe where we mostly trust one another, it does not compute.

And in my homelab, it certainly does not compute.

Why should I have to get any permission from my old device that I just reinstalled a minute ago?
Why should I need permission to do anything? I am the administrator.

Obviously in other countries (like the US) there need to be at least two people to make a decision of for example firing a missile, but in the rest of the world, it does not work that way in our home labs.

Anyway, I learned that you can shut it off with the command "pvecm e 1". But then again, you need to do this after every reboot if you want your VMs to start.
I am seeing countless hours in the future to battle this stupid setting.
And I mean STUPID in the MOST OFFENSIVE WAY!

 

[Scifibob]

I just found out by trial an error, that I can edit this file:
/etc/pve/corosync.conf
and remove a dead node from the cluster.
But it really should not be necessary.

 

[leesteken]

The common approach that Proxmox uses prevents a cluster from going down as long as more than half the nodes are working (with no node being special). That clearly does not suit your needs, so maybe other software might be a better fit?
Maybe you can use @reboot /usr/bin/pvecm e 1 in cron as a work-around? It might need a little delay or do it every minute or so. Then each node can decide for themselves what the shared settings are at any time, without communicating with other nodes.

 

[Scifibob]

I had to add a certificate again to the node, to be able to login with a dns address after adding the host to the cluster.
Certificates is related to the host, so I should not need to add those again after joining a cluster.
Or, the cluster should have a certificate store, but it does not.
So why is the nodes certificates invalid after joining a cluster?

 

[Scifibob]

@leesteken
You suggest that other software is a thing, but I chose Proxmox because I thought that it would run on 2 nodes for testing.
It works in my homelab after hours of work.
I'm testing this for my self, but also as a replacement for vmWare in my muncipality, and so far, I am not impressed.
But I feel that it could be made to work in the end, it may just be me that is not seeing it

I need more time to test.

 

[leesteken]

You suggest that other software is a thing, but I chose Proxmox because I thought that it would run on 2 nodes for testing.

Please don't use two nodes for a cluster without a qdevice for a third vote (or use a third node or more). Problems with two node clusters are not uncommon on this forum.

I'm testing this for my self, but also as a replacement for vmWare in my muncipality, and so far, I am not impressed.
But I feel that it could be made to work in the end, it may just be me that is not seeing it

A two node cluster is the worst scenario: I do expect it get better with three. Personally, I cannot compare the two nor do I have experience with clusters. In my experience, the use of common Linux technologies on which it is bases makes it very flexible but you might have to figure out and script some stuff yourself.
EDIT: And combining PVE with a (virtual) Proxmox Backup Server is really great in my opinion, with deduplicated full backups almost instantly (for running VMs).

 

[t.lamprecht]

But here in europe where we mostly trust one another, it does not compute.

Well, we're here in Europe too, and it certainly computes for us and the hundreds of thousands Proxmox VE installations that request updates from our CDN daily, the biggest chunk of them doing so from European IPs..

As you are mentioning that you learned quorum only recently suggests that you're in general a bit new to clustering, maybe even virtualization, which is fine, everybody needs to start somewhere. But it also seems that you think you have to fight it, but actually quorum protects you (or at least your cluster nodes and virtual machines and containers) when accessing shared resources to ensure that there can never be the situation where the same virtual guest is started on both nodes, causing an out-of-sync state and data corruption, which depending on the service it provides can be fatal for a lot of things.

Note that Proxmox VE is designed for the commercial enterprise use case and that we got many enterprise users running big setups with dozens of nodes and tooling that manages them, and there such basic data-safety and design-security guarantees protect them from facing millions in damage or even harming lives.
That Proxmox VE is so common in many home labs is mostly due to it being flexible and relatively easy to use compared to the feature set it provides and that while being 100% open source, without any feature gating.

If you do not want to run a cluster, especially not one where both nodes are always online at the same time, you can just use Proxmox VE on both of them as stand-alone setup, or like @leesteken recommended to you, set up a QDevice on a Raspberry Pi or the like.

 

[alexskysilk]

But here in europe where we mostly trust one another, it does not compute.

rofl I just about snorted my coffee. thank you, that made my morning.

ok I got that out of my system. If every member of the quorum have equal votes (err, "trust," as you put it) and you have a disagreement, how do you know who's right with an even number of votes?! have you given any thoughts to what a disagreement means in context of cluster opreations?

 

[Scifibob]

I have indeed learned a lot about quorum the last couple of days.
Mostly, that none of the big actors are using it, creating some google time for me.
I find that the idea is good (well decent enough), and does mostly work, so I am sorry for my angry comment, replacing it with another thought:
I am scouting for a replacement for vmware. Where do I start with Proxmox?

I do have some issues to post to bugzilla for version 8.0.3, so that's my agenda right now.
I still do not think this product is enterprise ready, so I'm not going to pay for anything yet.

I'm impressed of the moderators and staff (and also the users) on this forum. You are professional, compared to many other forums.