Introduction Migrating virtual machines between platforms can be a pain in the ass to put it mildly.
I have recently decided to migrate from ESXi to Proxmox VE, simply because it allows me downscale my lab from several “BIG” machines into a single machine.
When converting a lot of VM’s from ESXi to Proxmox VE I basically had to write the same commands over and over in the same sequence.
Introduction I recently started using proxmox in my homelab instead of using VMWare ESXi - this lead me to Proxmox Backup Server since it allows delta backups like my previous backup solution for ESXi.
With my old backup solution I backed up my “backup” to the cloud to my provider rsync which simplied is just a ssh connection where they have enabled certain programs to run and the underlying storage they use is ZFS.
Introduction When installing linux usually the installation defaults to DHCP for networking, which is perfectly fine if you are running a desktop machine. But if you install on a server you expect to have consistent addressing in place so it is possible to set up a name server and point a hostname towards your servers ip-address.
This can be solved in several ways:
Static IP DHCP with dynamic update of DNS Server DHCP assigned address that is fixed to the MAC Address of the network card This post will only be about setting up a static ip address, since that is the easiest solution and probably the solution that most people would want to use.
Introduction Everything dies, even enterprise hardware.
This is why having a failover is a good thing.
I am running my Proxmox VE 7 servers with a mirrored ZFS root pool, so I can protect myself against a single drive dying and taking down a proxmox server.
Today I received 8 SATADOM’s that I wanted to use for my boot drives intead of my SATA disks that were tiny and slow.
Introduction Backup is important unless you like to spend a lot of time recreating what was lost - if possible.
My kubernetes cluster is mostly stateless, with any state stored outside of the cluster on dedicated storage.
So to facilitate backup of the cluster I initially started doing full machine backups of all nodes, but that seemed silly since I can recreate a node in 5-10 minutes with my PXE setup that boots and installs Rocky Linux plus all the required prequisites to allow the machine to work as a kubernetes node.
Introduction Migrating virtual machines between platforms can be a pain in the ass to put it mildly.
I have recently decided to migrate from ESXi to Proxmox VE, simply because it allows me downscale my lab from several “BIG” machines into a single machine.
I am well aware that this makes my lab more fragile and prone to failures, but that is a price I am willing to take - at least for now.
Introduction When you have a cron job that runs, then sometimes you want the cron process to send an email, in case something goes wrong or if you have set your cronjob to produce output.
This happens automatically if your system is configured correctly, but if you like me just install a vanilla CentOS or Rocky and expect stuff like this to work, you have a couple of small extra tasks to perform.
Proxmox Backup Client Having recently installed Proxmox VE in my lab and also Proxmox Backup Server then I want to use it to backup as many machines as possible.
This is easy for virtual machines running inside Proxmox VE, since its already integrated.
But I also have physical machines running Rocky Linux & Centos 8, so this is a simple cook book to get it running on those two linux variants, since Proxmox does not provide pre-built packages.
Introduction When you want whatever you host inside a kubernetes cluster to be accessible from the outside - that being either on the LAN or on the internet, then you need a way for traffic to flow into the cluster, hit the correct pods and preferably all in a nice HA way.
There are several options you can use out of the box when you want to host services in a kubernetes cluster.
Prequisites Swap Swap when running containers is bad, since it can expose data from one container to another. So kubernetes refuses to run with it.
So turn it off by doing:
swapoff -a Edit /etc/fstab
And comment out any swap partition so it looks like:
#UUID=3d0751dd-102b-4941-9174-3c104ccc16c9 none swap defaults 0 0
Then run
systemctl daemon-reload And reboot.
Sometimes uncommenting the entry in fstab is not enough - and you need to actually delete the swap partition as well - otherwise “magic” in the kernel seems to detect a swap partition and mount it.
