In these days I put on production two different server (an internal machine and a EQ4 hetzner) using Proxmox as backend for managing virtual machines.
What is Proxmox?
Proxmox Virtual Environment is an easy to use Open Source virtualization platform for running Virtual Appliances and Virtual Machines.
Proxmox VE is an open source project, developed and maintained by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH.
Installation
The first thing that you are going to like of Proxmox, is that the installation of the latest stable consist of installing a Debian minimal on your machine, adding a custom repository and apt-getting proxmox-ve-2.6.32.
Keep in mind that the latest version is great for kvm support (both performances and compatibility) but you don’t get OpenVZ support (but it’s on the roadmap for the end of 2010). If you need OpenVZ support, you should stick to proxmox-ve-2.6.24 (old kernel, maybe incompatible with newer machines).
Network configuration
Before starting using your virtual environment, you need to configure network devices so you can use them. The most common configuration are bridged or routed (NATted).
The bridged configuration is straight-forward, and is great if you don’t need network separation for security reason: virtual machines will get IP from the DHCP of your current network.
The routed configuration is highly suggested for custom network setups, but need some knowledge of routing and iptables.
First access
After rebooting with the proxmox supplied kernel, you can start to configure virtual machines. What you need is HTTPS access to the proxmox server, using a browser (FireFox) with Java support (sigh, needed for getting video output of the guests).
Credentials are the same of the underlying system (user root).
Storage configuration
You can achieve best performances and easy management using a LVM-backed storage for your guests. With LVM you can easily create or expand disks assigned to guests, without the overhead of an underlying filesystem like with disk images (qcow, vdi, vmdk, etc). The standard directory based storage is anyway needed for storing ISO images.
Backups
A feature that I cannot find on other VE manager, is an integrated management of backups. You need to configurare a new storage with type “backups”, I use a remote NFS share.
If you have sufficient space on LVM volume group, you can use the snapshot backup model, that will ensure you only few seconds of downtime even with a very large disk.
Cluster management
Another killer-feature of Proxmox is the cluster management: on one page you can get the status of all of your proxmox machines and within a few clicks you can migrate guest from a server to another. The only things you need is to configure a master node and attach all others as slaves, with only one command on every server.
