The Proxmox Virtual Environment (VE) cluster forms the core of our student cloud infrastructure, designed to efficiently manage containerized student environments. With centralized storage, automated provisioning, and a tailored failover mechanism, the cluster ensures reliability and scalability for student projects.
The Proxmox cluster consists of three nodes: Omaha, Blackjack, and Pachinko, all running Proxmox VE 8.2.2. The cluster provides:
Dedicated IP Range:
A /16 subnet (up to ~64,000 IPv4 addresses) is reserved for student containers. Each container is assigned a static IP, ensuring consistent communication and management.
Network Configuration:
To avoid congestion between NFS, container traffic, and internet communication, each server is provisioned with 2x 1Gbps network interfaces. These interfaces are bonded using link aggregation, providing up to 2Gbps total bandwidth per server. Refer to the Networking page for further details.
Centralized Storage: Shared ZFS storage ensures seamless container recovery and consistent data access across nodes.
Dynamic Deployment: Containers are assigned to nodes based on resource availability at the time of provisioning.
Manual Failover: Lightweight failover is enabled through custom scripts that monitor node health and allow quick recovery of containers.
For details about individual nodes, refer to the Servers page.
Centralized storage is hosted on Omaha, leveraging a ZFS pool exported via NFS:
/storage using systemd mount units.This setup eliminates the need to replicate data between nodes, simplifying management and ensuring high performance for containerized workloads.
Student environments are deployed as LXC containers, leveraging lightweight virtualization for resource efficiency.
The Proxmox cluster employs a lightweight failover solution to maintain uptime:
For more advanced failover mechanisms and network configurations, see the Networking page.
Cluster performance and resource usage are monitored using:
Proxmox’s native tools, combined with ZFS capabilities, ensure robust backup and recovery:
The Proxmox cluster is central to our infrastructure, providing reliable and scalable container management tailored to student needs. For related topics, explore: