To keep it simple or not: let experience talk

[koulis1234]

Hi guys,

I am rolling out proxmox for my small business and im considering if the added complexity of proper HA is worth it for me since i can handle 5 min of downtime in case of hardware failure.

detail:
3 servers: one of which is very old so stays powered off only as a last resort and two which are online.
hosting websites, email, ldap and so on

Assuming i can accept the restart of a vm should i create a virtual shared storage (ceph or glusterfs) and use proxmox ha or just to backup the vm's between nodes every hour or so and just restart the vm on another node if one fails. A simple script with a software watchdog could do the latter but would take like 5 minutes for a vm to be back up (i suppose) compared to being instant in the case of HA

What do you think in terms of effort/benefit ratio?

I would really appreciate your input!!

Thanks!

 

[Alwin]

Judging from your description, you are looking for a active-backup solution. For this it would be preferable to use all three nodes, to get a reliable quorum. But if HA is not required, then it might be possible to even go with two hosts and use the pve storage replication (pvesr) to sync deltas of your VM disks to the other node.

https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvesr.html