Selecting a Proxmox Master Node for Cluster

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Markess

Well-Known Member
May 19, 2018
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TLDR Are there disadvantages or caveats to using a low spec node as Master in a Proxmox cluster?

I have four machines in my home setup. Two with Xeon E3-1220L (8 & 16GB RAM), and two with dual E5s and 128GB RAM. Only one of the E3 machines is on 24/7 as a NAS (bare metal Open Media Vault). The others (two currently on ESXi Free and one with Proxmox), are only on during the day/when I need them to keep noise/heat/consumption down in my home office/cave. I assume that if I switch them all to Proxmox and cluster them, I'd want the master node to be the one that's always on? Any issues with using the low end machine for this?

I'm strictly a home user at this point, so no plans for HA, failover, or shared storage. I'd be doing this mostly for ease of management and my own education.

I'm relatively inexperienced with virtualization so any recommendations & advice are greatly appreciated.
 

Terry Wallace

PsyOps SysOp
Aug 13, 2018
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There's no real reason the master node couldn't be one of the lower end boxes. I would recommend if you are going to cluster them you take a look at the threads about cluster service wearout on the boot zfs pools. The cluter sync service is know to be very write happy. Also take a minute and setup ring0 and ring1 networks correctly from the start.. its harder to fix afterwords. Also static names in your hosts files are your friends for both ring-0 and ring-1.

p.s. Proxmox is a multi master interface.. so the the Master node.. is just the one that you didn't turn off :)
 
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Markess

Well-Known Member
May 19, 2018
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Northern California
I would recommend if you are going to cluster them you take a look at the threads about cluster service wearout on the boot zfs pools....Also take a minute and setup ring0 and ring1 networks correctly from the start.. its harder to fix afterwords. Also static names in your hosts files are your friends for both ring-0 and ring-1....
Thanks very much for the tips. Those are the kind of details that I "didn't know that I didn't know"! Looking a bit deeper into these and other documentation pages these fed into, it looks like there's a number of things that are either impossible or very very difficult to change once a cluster is set up. Given that I have no practical experience in this area, I may just pull some old hardware out of the closet to cobble together and practice on first.