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

  • towerful@beehaw.org
    2·
    1 year ago

    I have 2 nodes and a raspberry pi as a qdevice.
    I can still power off 1 node (so I have 1 node and an rpi) if I want to.
    To avoid split brain, if a node can see the qdevice then it is part of the cluster. If it can’t, then the node is in a degraded state.
    Qdevices are only recommended in some scenarios, which I can’t remember off the top of my head.

    With 2 nodes, you can’t set up CEPH cluster (well, I don’t think you can).
    But you can set up High Availability, and use ZFS snapshot replication on a 5 minute interval (so, if your VMs host goes down, the other host can start it with a potentially outdated snapshot).

    This worked for my project as I could have a few stateless services that could bounce between nodes, and I had a postgres VM with streaming replication (postgres not ZFS) and failover. Which lead to a decently fault tolerant setup.