How do you handle Proxmox clusters when you only have 1 or 2 servers?
I technically have 3 servers but I keep one offline because I don’t need it 24/7 most point wasting power on a server I don’t need.
I believe I read somewhere that you can force Proxmox it to a lower number but it isn’t recommended. Has anyone done this and if so have you run into any issues with this?
My main issue is I want my VM to start no matter what. For example I had a power outage. When the servers came back online instead of starting they waited for the quorum number to reach 3. (it will never reach 3 because the third server wasn’t turn on.) so they just waited forever until I got home and ran
pvecm expected 2
If you are not using any HA feature and only put servers into the same cluster for ease of management.
You could use the same command but with a value of 1.
The reason quorum exist is to prevent any server to arbitrarily failover VMs when it believes the other node(s) is down and create a split brain situation.
But if that risk does not exist to begin with, so do the quorum.
You can use a small device like a Raspberry Pi as a Qdevice to be the third vote in quorum. It doesn’t have to be a full Proxmox server.
You’ll need a QDevice to keep consensus. That wiki article will cover how to set it up and some drawbacks to QDevices. You should be able to run it on a low-power device like a Pi to keep the cluster going.
AFAIK forcing it to a lower number is fine if you’re not doing HA. I remember reading something along those lines on a forum, but I could be remembering wrong.
If you’re not using Ceph or HA, then I don’t think there would be any negative effects from not having all the servers in the cluster ready.
Oh good, I am not using any of those at least not at the moment.
Oh good, I am not using any of those at least not at the moment.
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ok
I haven’t tested this at all, it’s just popped into my head, but, could you create a VM on one of the nodes and join that to the cluster?
If it does work, I wouldn’t recommend it. But I’d be curious to see if that would work.
That leads to a chicken and egg situation. The Proxmox cluster can’t turn on VM because the VM isn’t on to be the third node in the cluster number :)
