Proxmox VE Cluster - Chapter 009 - Creating the cluster

Proxmox VE Cluster - Chapter 009 - Creating the cluster

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

This post is about turning half a dozen separate Proxmox VE hosts into a combined cluster.

Reference docs for today:

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Cluster_Manager

https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvecm.html

Cluster creation was done "by the book" and it was uneventful.

Two interesting points to note:

1. You'll need a peer root password.
2. After a node is added to the cluster you'll have to manually refresh the web UI because the https SSL certs are changing.

In retrospect, I wish I had manually assigned node IDs to match the hostname rather than just letting the system assign incrementing numbers.  My node "proxmox021" would be better identified by manually assigned id 21, rather than autoassigned id 1.

NFS Cluster-wide Storage References

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Storage:_NFS

https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvesm.html#storage_nfs

The NFS shares were created on the TrueNAS server back in blog post Chapter 004

Add NFS shares to the cluster:

1. Log into proxmox, "Datacenter", "Storage", "Add", "NFS".
2. ID: use the name from the list of shares such as proxmox-diskimages
3. Server: 10.10.20.4 (always use IP Address in case DNS is down)
4. Export: Should autopopulate with dropdowns
5. Content: Exit selections to match
6. "Add"

Verify all six NFS shares are "Shared Yes" and "Enabled Yes"

We now have a working Proxmox VE cluster.  The next step will be loading some software ISO images into the cluster and creating some test VMs to experiment on and gain Proxmox experience before applying a real workload to the cluster.