Im fairly new to the whole process of setting up a virtualization server and it's also my first Minisforum. So, im looking for some advice on exactly how to proceed.
I have the MS-A2, and I would like to setup a virtualization server using ProxMox. I have some questions.
I have a small business, and I need several server instances to handle internal and external tasks. I may be small biz, but to me it's critical that I don't loose data. Is it possible to install 2 NVME drives in a mirrored pair for redundancy? Ive been told to use HW raid because using SW raid means the software stack running the raid has more potential failure points compared to a dedicated HW raid configuration. Also, im wondering how to setup a network config which has private/internal VM's which can communicate outward, and also a set of VM's which can reach outward but are not allowed to reach inward to my internal/private network. I really don't know how to set that up. I have a ubiquity router, and all attempts to setup subnets don't provide that network isolation. It seems all nodes can communcate regardless of which network they are on, so im not geting that isolation of the internal network away from the nodes which are on a public network.
Just not sure what im doing wrong. So, looking for advice.
Ron,
Welcome to the VHT forums, glad to have you here and congrats on your foray into Proxmox and running it on an MS-A2. I really like these little mini PCs as they have a lot hardware packed into the package. So, there are a few things that you need to consider if you are running a business from this setup and configuration. If your data and virtual workloads are critical, I would have at least 2 of the MS-A2s and not 1. This would give you the ability to have replicas across both for your virtual machines so that you could earmark 1 as a primary and 1 as a secondary without the need to cluster them together. Usually mirrored disks are a great idea for critical data, but you still have a single failure point with a single machine such that if anything dies with that single machine, your apps and services are down.
You can definitely use hardware RAID or ZFS. Each has their tradeoffs, but ZFS is much more safe than traditional software RAIDs from back in the day. The information about your data and parity are owned on the disks and not in Proxmox. However, ZFS requires more RAM to operate and there is some CPU overhead which is negligible on today's CPUs.
With your network setup, you can do this with VLANs, subnets, and firewall rules. By default a router or even firewall from most vendors will route traffic between all the subnets that it has directly connected (your Ubiquity router). So, you need a firewall so you can implement firewall rules to control which subnets/VLANs can communicate between them. Not sure which Ubiquity you have, but is it capable of implementing firewall rules?
Hopefully, some of these ideas will help you with the thought process of designing your infrastructure. If it were my network and services to make sure they were resilient, I would have at least 2 machines, one running as the primary and the other as a secondary Proxmox node and have replicas of your VMs between them. You could also consider clustering, but that would get into the need for shared storage. Standalones would keep things simpler and you would still have good resiliency there. I would also add a Proxmox backup server to the mix to have a third copy of your data and point in time restores. This is a free solution and works great.
Let me know if this helps Ron,
Brandon