[kwlug-disc] Proxmox Articles and Discussion for Future Presentations

[Jason]

Hi all,

So from the survey in my previous presentation, there was a lot of interest
for a presentation on Proxmox.
I'd like to get some more details on what everyone would like to see,
keeping in mind the amount of detail there is potentially to cover.
Thanks Paul for suggesting I send this out.

Doing an overview and demo on Proxmox would be an easy start, and could
spur some additional questions, but if there's something specific you'd
like to know more about, I can either plan a presentation, or it may be a
good candidate for another article.
I've covered a lot of the common topics from my experience setting up and
using Proxmox, and I've detailed the step-by-step process below, along with
a lot of resources.

1.  Converting VMware VMs to Proxmox

Proxmox has a CLI command `qm importdisk` that can convert a VMWare VMDK
file to a QEMU/KVM type for use with Proxmox.

There is also a new wizard in Proxmox coming with a GUI wizard to import
VMWare ESXi VMs.  This is currently in test, but there is an article going
over it here:
https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2024/03/proxmox-new-import-wizard-for-migrating-vmware-esxi-vms/

I detailed my experience converting my VMs to run on Proxmox in this
article:
https://www.linuxtek.ca/2023/01/18/migrating-virtual-machines-from-vmware-to-proxmox/

2.  Proxmox Clustering

Proxmox uses the Corosync Cluster Engine as a group communication system.
There is a Proxmox Cluster Manager that can be used to create the cluster.
This can be done in the WebUI or CLI.  I used the WebUI, but I did have to
spend a lot of time configuring everything, and setting up separate
networks and interfaces for the traffic.

I wrote this article on the experience:
https://www.linuxtek.ca/2023/01/19/setting-up-a-proxmox-cluster/

4.  Ceph Clustering on Proxmox

In order to use High Availability with Proxmox, you need shared storage
independent of the cluster nodes, so that the VMs can be transitioned
between nodes if there is a failover event.
This could be an NFS drive, or some other kind of shared storage.

The other way to do this is to use Ceph, which is a software defined
storage platform.  This allows replication of the data across the Proxmox
nodes, making it highly available.
I chose to use Ceph on the Proxmox nodes to store the VM disks themselves,
and I use my TrueNAS server to store larger datasets they can interact with.

This article goes through how I set that up:
https://www.linuxtek.ca/2023/01/27/ceph-clustering-with-proxmox/

5.  High Availability with Proxmox

So finally, with all that in place, we can enable high availability in
Proxmox.  This can be done at the VM level, by adding them to a High
Availability Group.

This article goes through the explanation and setup:
https://www.linuxtek.ca/2023/02/05/setting-up-a-high-availability-cluster-with-proxmox/

Hope that helps.  Let me know if you have any questions that I didn't
answer in the articles, or would like to see in a live presentation.

Cheers,
Jason
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