Anyone done this before? Any gotcha's to look out for?
I did :)
Try to get your VMs on SSDs as much as possible, then mount spinning disks as additional storage for the data, otherwise the IO will be crazy high at
times. Plan your RAID based on need as well, avoid RAID-5 for OS drives, it's OK for data tho most of the times.
If you plan on having multiple machines running similar OSes, using ZFS with plenty of RAM and deduplication enabled will save a lot of space but will
cost memory. Compression can also help for IO mitigation (since it
read/writes less on the disk) but with an additional cost in CPU.
If you want to have it run in cluster mode, you need a central storage
solution as well, lots of trial and error there as well. I ended up using
a Fiber attached SAN but you may be good with iSCSI or even NFS/SMB.
Proxmox is really a cool platform tho, been using it since v3 at least and never looked back. I surprise myself when I get to an ESXi platform to try to do something that works under Proxmox but unavail in ESX unless you pay the
big bucks (if it can).
I'd check for workstations instead of Optiplex tho, something like the HP
Z400. Better machine specs and in the refurb market they are pretty cheap and super silent as well.
If you can afford the noise, rackmount servers are the best value for performance but fans are noisy...
Clustered virtualization is a science in itself so it works the way you
intend it to work. Also, make a lot of testing before putting something in "prod". Try disconnecting stuff, shutdown hosts, etc and see if it behaves
like you want it to do...
Have fun!
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