Does that need to be true though? For like true “counting in how many 9’s” HA of course. But there’s nothing technically preventing high availability in 2 nodes; if the storage is shared and there’s a process to keep the memory in sync it should be possible with 2 nodes have some degree of high availability, even if it’s with big warnings.
Those are all fair, also the entire open-vswitch setup is very clunky. I always avoid the UI and just edit /etc/network/interfaces directly, especially for vlan networks. I dislike that it wants 3 nodes but I understand, still 2 nodes in the homelab is pretty reasonable. I wish in general the HA was more configurable, robust, and intuitive.
Yes, we are a medical/dental/pharmacy university and because of some of the specific data needs of our org we have a large on-prem ecosystem. We are currently a VMWare shop, but Broadcom’s business strategies have made us look for alternatives. I’ve used Proxmox in the homelab for years and have been feeling as its gotten more and more polished it’s ready to be considered for production work. Currently we have a lab environment of previous gen hardware which I want to use as a test-bed for possible production platform moves.
Proxmox isn’t VMware yet, but it’s close. The HA doesn’t work the same, I’ve struggled with something akin to DRS. If you use on-host storage, you have to constantly do replication work to keep them synced and even then a failover is essentially a storage rollback to the last sync. If you use iscsi storage, you have to be very careful. Snapshotting is only functional when backed by a few of the storage types, and we use ZFS. ZFS over isci is somewhat brittle, but we have a TrueNAS device which supports it here. We use Veeam as our enterprise backup solution, and I have no idea how these will work together. Veeam talks directly to our Nimble storage, does storage-based snapshots, and replicates them to our other site. Veeam theoretically does talk to TrueNAS, but without supporting Proxmox I don’t know what the backup/recovery flow would look like. Veeam is looking into this: https://community.veeam.com/discussion-boards-66/veeam-researching-support-for-vmware-alternative-proxmox-as-backup-buyers-fret-about-broadcom-6530 We tried to use TrueNas ZFS snapshots for just general VM semi-backup, but unless you want to rollback your whole dataset, it doesn’t work well. You have to make separate snapshot tasks for the specific zvol/dataset, otherwise you’re rolling your whole dataset back. Also, I tried mounting a snapshot, hoping to then share it as an iSCSI extent and remount it to a VM and pull out a specific file…this didn’t work at all, I can’t get the UI to show the promoted clone so I can try to present it to the host.
When coming back from a power-off, if your Proxmox hosts are in a cluster, there’s no cluster-aware startup order (HA disables the entire startup delay system). That’s not great, our apps have SQL dependencies which need to be started first.
That’s the issues, and it sounds negative, but ultimately for a zero-cost hypervisor that’s under active development those issues need to be viewed through the lens of the overwhelming achievement that the project is and continues to be.
We’re converting our workplace lab to Proxmox and it’s a great ramp for eventually leaving vmware. Great system.
Yes, but it’s not an option yet. We’re heavily invested in veeam and are not looking to replace that piece yet.