Prologue
So it was this January I’ve decided it’s time to break off the Ubuntu-can-run-it-all and decided I want to separate my OpenVPN server from always-crashing-my-system test containers I like to mess with a lot.
So pretty much, find ESXi CD, install it, and it’s off to the races, right?
Considering my attic server runs premium 2.5GB of RAM with Core2Duo CPU, I was trying to be as RAM-efficient as possible. I’ve had experience with larger servers, where ESXi ate about 1GB of ram! Ouch!
The solution… that raises problems.
So I’ve decided to explore the world a little bit. After not that while, I found Proxmox VE, a bundle of LXC and KVM hypervisor, that also supports clustering and on-the-fly migrations; so I have decided to give it a shot.
So, after downloading ISO image, creating USB boot drive, here comes the problem no. 1: it would not install. It requires a CD drive to be installed. In Twenty-freaking-Eighteen. Not even this seemed to work.
So it can’t be all that bad, right? After installing it, updating it, (note that you have to disable proprietary repositories if you don’t have paid subscription), I’ve downloaded few LXC and ISO images on the storage, and deployed a single-noded VM “cluster”, if you wish to say it so.
I can’t remember whether the MariaDB/MySQL server did not work here on Debian CTs, or was it only the problem of Ubuntu LXC, I’ve still installed it on CentOS, along with Asterisk, NginX, TFTP, and even Bind9 each in their own Debian CTs, while OpenVPN Debian got its’ KVM.
Hint: you can add more nodes to the cluster, just make sure that they are empty before you wish to add it. Corosync and PVE will not allow it, because you might have VM ID conflict.
Epilogue
After four months of using PVE, here’s what I can shout out to sysadmins that are willing to try out.
Try it in your development sandboxes first! The GUI is (in my eyes) much more intuitive than the ESXi, but there are still a lot of options that you can mess up with. ESXi’s console is a bit laggy and sometimes fails to display settings after you just open, close and reopen the VM settings window. Nothing to be seen here, so far.
Be prepared to fiddle with CLI as well. Mounting network shares “rwx” to containers is easiest with mounting them onto your node, then from the node into your CT. Requires a bit of everything. (My solution is a mash-up of this article, this solution, this one and some others that currently can’t find.
Sure enough, things are going to break once in a while. Be prepared to face with blank UI with lots of question marks written all over the stats of your VMs. The fastest way to fix this is to reboot the node - from the SSH/terminal, as the web UI is dead by this point. I haven’t focused much on finding the root of the problem.
OpenVPN in KVM works, it just takes a while to start up (mind my PC config above!).
Rating
10/10 for the effort to making things like that freely accessible, these guys are really trying to do their best. Mind the nice price tag for their enterprise support, though
7.5/10 for web GUI functionality
8/10 for web GUI looks
6/10 for occasional hick-up-s with CTs
Expect this article to grow with time. I’ve got lots of things to say, just can’t find them around at the moment.
Conclusion
If you need a test bench or demo lab, go for it. If you are using it in production, be sure to test it fully before you push it forwards.