[PVE-User] Notes on Proxmox VE 1.0 release

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

Ok, I downloaded the 1.0 release... and just thought I'd mention my experiences testing it out today.

Installer - I setup two physical machines and did the bare-metal install on both of them.  I was impressed with the various screens presented during the install and was glad to see that I was able to set a hostname and root password... as well as set an admin email address. Nice!

Cluster setup - Cluster creation is still not available from the web-interface... but it works fine from the command line.  It only took a few seconds.

OS Templates - I downloaded a couple from the built in links.  Then I deleted them.  Then I uploaded some OS Templates I had built myself for CentOS 5.2 i386, CentOS 5.2 x86_64, Fedora 9 i386, and Fedora 9 x86_64.  I also uploaded an .iso image for Windows XP Pro SP2.  I noticed that it synced the container and KVM install media from the master to the secondary automatically.  Worked great.  The download tab is stateless... so I can switch between tabs and return and the download status is maintained.  Nice!  The only issue I noticed was that it "Description" listed for the OS Templates I uploaded is listed as "-- unknown --".  What is it looking for exactly to populate the description?  Is there a file I can place in my OS Template that will populate the description field?  it would be nice to be able to edit the description from the web interface but that isn't an option.

Live migration of OpenVZ containers - Seems to be spotty.  Sometimes live migration would work, sometimes it wouldn't.  When a live migration failed it did so without fault... and the container just continued to run on the physical host it was on. Offline migration worked 100% of the time.

Live migration of a KVM machine worked fine... but so far I've only tested it once.

Backups - Seems to be semi functional.  On the master I can only see the virtual machine / containers that are on the master.  On the secondary, I can can see the machines running on it and I can schedule a job... but when I save the job it fails because it doesn't have write permission.  Similar error to what one gets when one tries to do manage migrations from a non-master node.  So, as far as I can tell, backups only work on the master node for virtual machines / containers running on the master node... and there isn't any way to backup virtual machines / containers running on slave nodes.

vnc-applet access - I'm primarily using a Fedora 9 x86_64 workstation to run Firefox 3 on to access the web interface and although I have a working JRE setup (at least the Sun JRE test web page works - http://java.com/en/download/help/testvm.xml) the vnc-applet won't work.  That isn't really Proxmox VE's fault but it would be nice if there was some alternative connection method... like the stock VNC client application.

On a 32-bit Windows box running Firefox 2.x the arrow-down dropdown menus would collide with each other.  For example, if there were two machines in a listing, the arrow-down dropdown menu for the first machine would mess up when it physically overlapped the listing of the second machine.  This is a bug in Firefox 2 I guess.  Worked fine in Firefox 3.

Over all I'm very impressed with the improvements made in the 1.0 release.  Keep up the good work!

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]