Proxmox VE Cluster - Chapter 003 - Order of Operations for Level 1.0

Proxmox VE Cluster - Chapter 003 - Order of Operations for Level 1.0

A voyage of adventure, moving a diverse workload running on OpenStack, Harvester, and RKE2 K8S clusters over to a Proxmox VE cluster.

The order of operations is complicated because I intend to keep most of the workload fully operational during the conversion.  Its kind of like rebuilding a car engine while driving the car down the road.

1. Convert the old Rancher "RKE2" K8S cluster into a very small Proxmox VE cluster.  This step will be successful if I have a working three node Proxmox cluster.
2. Move everything off the small Rancher Harvester test cluster, which is currently slowly running an old version of Harvester, and add those nodes into the small Proxmox VE cluster.  The measure of success will be having six clustered Proxmox nodes.
3. Get some practice with VMs on the small test cluster.  Success will be defined as some working scratch (test load only) Ubuntu servers with a couple days "burn-in" and operational experimentation.
4. Move a minimal set of very small production services on the small Proxmox VE cluster.  Maybe start with the wiki server, one of the multiple Active Directory Domain Controllers, just enough to prove out the operation of the cluster.  I consider this step a success if everything "important" on the old OS1 cluster is minimally running on the new Proxmox server reliably for a couple days.
5. Migrate all production workload off the OS1 OpenStack cluster then add the former OS1 nodes into the now medium-sized Proxmox VE cluster.  Success at this step looks like a Proxmox cluster of nine nodes running a minimal production workload for a couple uninterrupted days.
6. Roll ALL production workload off the OS2 OpenStack cluster into the now medium sized Proxmox VE cluster, likely a tight fit.  Success looks like OS2 having zero load and Proxmox carrying the entire production load, although in theory if Proxmox crashed I have the OS2 cluster has a hot-backup to Proxmox.
7. Convert the remaining OS2 OpenStack cluster into even more Proxmox cluster capacity.  This step is a success if the Proxmox cluster has twelve operating nodes holding the entire production load, and I'm no longer running RKE2 or Harvester or OpenStack or any other cluster system on bare metal.
8. Verify Operation, load balancing, run it for awhile before working on Architecture level 2.0.  Success looks like no crashing, no bugs, no issues, optimized CPU/memory settings and optimized workload across the dozen cluster nodes.

Next post will be about Infrastructure preparation efforts, get as much stuff ready as possible before starting the big conversion project.