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posted this in: Servers, Technology
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It’s been about a week since I decided to properly up my game in terms of home services within the server Rack and convert a room in my house into the “JT-LAB”. I’ve blogged about having to learn to re-rack everything, and setting up a kind of double-nginx-proxy situation. Not to mention setting this blog up so I have a dedicated rant space instead of using my main jtiong.com domain.

As I’ve constantly wanted to keep things running with an ideal of “minimal maintenance” in mind going forward; it’s beginning to make more and more sense that I deploy a High Availability cluster. I’ve been umm’ing and ahh’ing about Docker Swarm, VMWare, and Proxmox – and I think, I’ll be settling for Proxmox’s HA cluster implementation. The price (free!) and the community size (for just searching for answers) are very convincing; so this blog post is going to be about my adventures of implementing a Proxmox HA Cluster using a few servers in the rack.

What are the benefits of going the Proxmox HA route?

Simply just high availability. I have a number of similarly spec’d out servers; forming a cluster means the uptime of the VMs (applications, sites, services) that I run is maximized. Maintenance has minimal interference with what’s running. I could power down one node, and the other nodes will take up the slack and keep the VMs running whilst I do said maintenance.

Uptime – hardware failure similarly means that I could continue running the websites I have paying customers for, with minimal concern that there’d be a prolonged downtime period.

So, that sounds great, what’s the problem?

I’m rusty. I’ve not touched Proxmox in about a decade since; and on top of that, I already actually have a node configured – but incorrectly. VMs currently use the local storage on the single cluster node to handle things; so I need to find a way to mitigate this.

The suggested way, if all the nodes have similar storage setups, is to use a ZFS mirror between all the nodes, such that they can all have access to the same files as needed. By default, Proxmox sets replication between the nodes to every 15 minutes per VM. This seems pretty excessive and would require really fast inter-connects between servers for reliable backups (10Gbit).

There’s a lot of factors to go through with this…

**is perplexed**