Setting up a new cluster and lots of VMs, Looking for suggestions.

[Mani]

My first post here, to best of my knowledge, I think, I am posting in correct place. If wrong, Please do the needful.

We are hosting company, providing VPS services to multiple customers. So far, We are using OpenVZ in standalone node, each node contains around 50 ~ 80 VMs, Its all working well. So far, We have not faced any major issues.

Our concern right now is, If any node goes down due to hardware issue or any other problem, All the VMs in the hardware node also goes down. We want to avoid this kind of situation, I hope, We can avoid this kind of situation in the ProxMox.

1. Though, We are not expecting high availability, At least, We should be able to migrate the VM from one node to another hardware node quickly, ( I guess this is possible only when we have network storage)

2. The following are the storage type supported by ProxMox, Which is the best in terms of reliability and faster IO.
LVM Group (network backing with iSCSI targets)
iSCSI target
NFS Share
Direct to iSCSI LUN
ceph storage cluster

3. Is there anyone here providing service to setup as a freelancer ?

Please help me to understand the above.

 

[LnxBil]

First, OpenVZ is not supported anymore in Proxmox VE 4.x, so you have to migrate all your containers (see Wiki for more information).

1) offline-migration is always possible (if the underlying storage supports it), online migration needs shared storage (in a KVM setting, LXC does not support online migration yet, but they're working on it. (https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage)
2) Depends on the size of your cluster environment and your SAN - you need one, or use Ceph. Normally NFS is the easiest to setup and has shared storage directly as a file storage. LVM is the default method if you have a FC or iSCSI-based SAN and use KVM on top of it, so it's a block storage, which is faster than a NFS-based file storage - also works for LXC. Direct iSCSI-LUN (on a per-VM-basis) is a lot of work on the storage and on the Proxmox VE side, better use LVM. Ceph is a different kind of monster. If you do not have a HA SAN environment, it is the way to go, but you need beefy machines to run it with good performance.
3) There is a list of companies on the Proxmox VE site which could assist you.

 

[mir]

2. The following are the storage type supported by ProxMox, Which is the best in terms of reliability and faster IO.
LVM Group (network backing with iSCSI targets)
iSCSI target
NFS Share
Direct to iSCSI LUN
ceph storage cluster

You missed:
ZFS over iSCSI