Proxmox VE 2.1 – Adding Distributed Storage Technologies

Hello World,

Introduction

This would be a really short post !   On July 25 , 2012, the PROXMOX VE team has released a new kernel of their product.  This release is mainly a maintenance release. However, after reading the announcement, I’ve noticed that this release is including distributed storage technologies Sheepdog and ceph.

Distributed Storage Technologies in Proxmox VE

These technologies look really promising.  These technologies are at an early stage of development/integration with Proxmox VE. For example, ceph technology is not yet integrated within the Proxmox VE software and thus, you will need to build up the distributed storage on other servers.  Sheepdog has been included in the Proxmox VE.  However, the technology/product is quite young and additional testing/development  needs to be performed.

Note that  you should not use these technologies yet in your production environment.  Even Proxmox VE recommends not to use them(more specifically Sheepdog) because there is a high risk of loosing data.  However, you can start testing these technologies in your lab environment and see if you can bring some feedback to the Proxmox VE Team

To upgrade to the latest Proxmox VE 2.1 version that includes the distributed storage technology, you can use the following command from a command prompt/console

 ‘aptitude update && aptitude full-upgrade’

After the upgrade, you should be able to start testing the new storage feature offered by Proxmox VE.  Proxmox VE team has already provided a draft documentation on how to perform the installation.  You can have a look at the following links

 

Both technologies seems really promising.  Ceph project has been receiving support from Ubuntu Comunity. These 2 projects are building cluster storage solution with no single point of failure by replicating data between multiple nodes.  If one of the node goes down, the remaing infrastructure will take over ensuring high availability of the system.

 

Final Notes

This is it for this post ! I’ll probably starting to test the Sheepdog/Ceph storage in my lab environment.  If I succeed in installing it and having a working infrastructure, I’ll let you know ! (I mean, I’ll post something)

Till next Time

See ya

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