Preface

This book is well overdue in the world of virtualization. When I first came in contact with Proxmox several years ago, I did not have anything to fall back on other than Proxmox Wiki and forum. I learned Proxmox through lots of trial and error and very much had to reinvent wheels on my own in some cases. Since a lot of us went through the frustration and I personally do not feel others should have to invest a lot of time just to get to know Proxmox the hard way, this book has been written.

This book shows the inner workings of Proxmox including virtual network components, shared storage systems, nested virtualization, complex network topologies, and so on. With this book, we hope that the reader will be able to better equip themselves to face any virtualization challenges of any virtual infrastructure.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Dive into the Virtual World with Proxmox, introduces Proxmox in general and the graphical user interface.

Chapter 2, Proxmox Under the Hood, introduces the Proxmox directory structure and configuration files.

Chapter 3, Shared Storages with Proxmox, explains how Proxmox interacts with the shared storage system and types of shared storage system supported.

Chapter 4, A Virtual Machine for a Virtual World, covers advanced virtual machine configurations such as enabling sound, USB devices, and so on.

Chapter 5, Network of Virtual Networks, explains the different networking components used in Proxmox to build virtual networks.

Chapter 6, Proxmox HA – Zero Downtime, explains the Proxmox High Availability (HA) feature and how to configure it.

Chapter 7, High Availability Storage for High Availability Cluster, explains a step-by-step process of setting up the Ceph cluster to be used as a shared storage system.

Chapter 8, Proxmox Production Level Setup, explains the type of hardware that should be and can be used in a production level Proxmox cluster setup.

Chapter 9, Proxmox Troubleshooting, lists real incidents with solutions that may arise in the Proxmox cluster.

Chapter 10, Putting It All Together, introduces several scenario-based virtual environments along with full network diagrams.

What you need for this book

Since we will be working with the Proxmox cluster throughout the book, it will be extremely helpful to have a working Proxmox cluster of your own. A very basic cluster of two Proxmox nodes and a storage node will do just fine.

Who this book is for

This book is for readers who want to build a virtual infrastructure purely based on Proxmox as hypervisor and Ceph as storage backend. Whether the reader is a veteran in the virtualized industry but has never worked with Proxmox, or somebody just starting out a promising career in this industry, this book will serve well.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The beginning of the tag shows the name of the cluster as name="pmx-cluster"."

A block of code is set as follows:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<cluster name="pmx-cluster" config_version="2">
<cman keyfile="/var/lib/pve-cluster/corosync.authkey"></cman>
<clusternodes>
  <clusternode name="pmxvm01" votes="1" nodeid="1"/>
  <clusternode name="pmxvm02" votes="1" nodeid="2"/>
</clusternodes>
</cluster>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

# ssh [email protected]

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The Storage tab is probably one of the most important options in the Proxmox GUI."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Questions

You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.