Small Cloud Cluster design and strategy

mkultra

New Member
Jan 12, 2025
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Currently in the process of redesigning our infrastructure. We currently have 2 bare metal linux servers cloud server.

We have a very limited budget for about 3 rather small servers. I want to take advantage of virtualisation to separate our workloads, redundancy, take advantage of snapshots, quickly deploy environments for our dev team. This is the general design I came up with :
  • Two Proxmox nodes running on about those specs : 8C/16T 32GB DDR4 2x1 TB SSD
  • A smaller server hosting a firewall (bare metal), probably pfSense/OPNsense, to act a gateway for the hypervisors.
I expect about 4-5 VMs to be run full time. Initially, I initially wanted those three servers to Proxmox nodes, but I prefer to not expose the hypervisor itself to the internet.

Each servers has two NIC, one for internet connectivity (which wouldn't be used for the two Proxmox nodes) and one connecting to the cloud provider private network. Private bandwidth is about 1Gb/s.

With those constrains, it seems to me that using Stardwind vSAN is the only reasonable option for such a small cluster. Still, vSAN require the use of multiples private NIC (heartbeat/replication).

As for quorum : FreeBSD has a port for corosync. Kind of a hacky solution, but the firewall could (maybe) be used a qDevice. If not, provision the smallest usable server/vps/instance to act as qDevice.

I have little to no experience with that sorts of deployements. What would be the best way to leverage our limited ressources ?
 

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