Proxmox VE Cluster - Chapter 020 - Architecture 1.0 Review and Future Directions

Proxmox VE Cluster - Chapter 020 - Architecture 1.0 Review and Future Directions

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

What worked

So far, everything.  And it all works better than I expected, and was generally less of a headache than I anticipated.  Performance is vastly better than OpenStack for various design and overall architectural reasons.

How long it took

I am writing these blog posts in a non-linear fashion so the final editing of this post is being done on a CEPH cluster with HA and the new software defined networking system and quite a few other interesting items, most of which already have rough draft blog posts.

However, if you believe Clockify, over the course of half a year of hobby-scale effort, I have logged 125 hours, 57 minutes, and 52 seconds getting to this point.  So, around "three weeks full time labor" to convert a small OpenStack cluster to a medium size half-way-configured Proxmox VE cluster.  I believe this is about half the time it took to convert from VMware to OpenStack a couple years back.

Future Adventures

This is just a list of topics you can expect to see in blog posts and Spring City Solutions Youtube videos probably after the holidays or in late winter / early spring:  Setting up and upgrading CEPH.  Optimizing memory, CPU, storage.  Adding the new SDN feature.  Open vSwitch and Netgear hardware QoS.  Connecting Ansible and probably Terraform to Proxmox.  Monitoring using Observium, Zabbix, and Elasticsearch.  Setting up Rancher and RKE2 production clusters on top of Proxmox.  Backups using the Proxmox Backup Server product.  Cloud-init, will I ever it it working the way I want it to work?  HA High Availability, unfortunately I can verify this software feature works excellently during hardware failures.  USB pass thru.  

Most of the stuff listed above is done or in process, and already partially documented in rough draft blog posts.  CEPH integration, for example, has been unimaginably cool.

Anyway, thanks for reading and have a great day!