What is exactly that "replication" do?

[dhanielsnieto]

Hello i've recently installed proxmox ve 6.1.7 on 2 diferents servers between same network.
i've created a cluster between 2 servers using ZFS.
i restored 2 machines from my old proxmox machine.
Then I enabled replication every 1 hour.

And i only see the disk in replication, i was expecting a replication of entire machine, am i wrong?
in case that one machine fails, how can i use the other one to continue working?

thanks in advance.

 

[narrateourale]

It does exactly that. Replicate the VMs disk to the other node. You can then enable it to be HA so that if the one node fails, it will be booted on the other.

Each node in a cluster has the configurations of all guests so the failover node can take ownership of the guest as long as it has access to the disks. That's what the replication is for. Useful if there is no other shared storage available.

One important thing though: from what I can tell your cluster has two nodes only. If one of them is offline, the cluster won't be quorate anymore. Which means you will not be able to take any actions like creating or starting a VM.

You could either add a third node to still have the majority of votes if one goes down or add a so called QDevice to have a third vote without a full PVE installation.

It's just a service that can run on another computer that is not part of the cluster. Could be a container on the backup server or on a raspberry pi.

The docs explain it and how to set it up
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_corosync_external_vote_support

 

[mmenaz]

Without HA, you can manually move the vm (I've asked many times for a GUI solution for small 2 node setups when you can phisically see the server that is turned off and want to start with easy the survived one).
Have a look at
"Migrating a guest in case of Error" inside
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage_Replication