[PVE-User] Basic SOHO (test/lab) cluster setup guide

[Emmanuel Kasper]

On 02/26/2016 08:16 PM, Michael Peele wrote:
> I'm working on building my personal SOHO cluster.  I started with a Windows
> Home Server for everything, then found Proxmox.
> I've got a few old PCs and one newish one.
> I plan to run my primary storage with family photos, videos, and documents,
> so reliability is important.  (But, alas, I haven't afforded ECC memory,
> and that debate is out of scope of this question.)
> 
> Given
> 
>    - two or three small home/office PCs with varying amounts of Mirrored
>    SSD and Mirrored HDD,
>    - no need for actual HA, but being able to move an instance from one
>    hardware box to another would be great.
>    - need for some speed (I'm impatient, thus have SSDs) in bursts
>    - need for backup of important folders, and no backup of test/liveCD
>    type VM instances.
>    - need for external access (which I'm planning on Owncloud)
> 
> Is there a setup guide for a good, cheap, solid, stable 2 node cluster with
> backup?
> I've already spend too much time getting ZFS boot and ZFS storage to be
> able to house disk images and containers.  It is working now.
> 
> For example, should I use ZFS, or Gluster or Cephs?  Aren't Gluster and
> Cephs newer, less stable, and more complex?  What about DRBD?  Does DRBD go
> on top of ZFS or is it a replacement?

Hi Michael

ZFS is a local storage, so you will not be able to do live migrations of
VMs between physical servers, but you will be able to move the VMs
around when they are shutdown.
Be aware that Ceph is an order of magnitude more complex to administer (
why ? because doing higly available, safe, and fast at the same time is
not that easy)

So I would suggest you to keep ZFS everywhere for your storage needs if
you have it working. If you like to tinker and a lot of time you can of
course try something else.

Just follow the steps from
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_VE_4.x_Cluster
and ask here if something is not clear.

Emmanuel