Two-Node High Availability Cluster

Note: This is a work in progress, stay tuned!

Note: Article about Proxmox VE 2.0 beta

Introduction

This article explores how to build a two-node cluster with HA enabled under Proxmox. HA is generally recommended to be deployed on at least three nodes to prevent strange behaviours and potentially lethal data incoherences (for further info look for "Quorum". Nevertheless, with some tweaking, it is also possible to successfully use Proxmox to run on a two-node cluster.

Although in the case of two-node clusters it is recommended to use a third, shared quorum disk partition, Proxmox allows to build the cluster without it. Let's see how.

System requirements

If you run HA, only high end server hardware with no single point of failure should be used. This includes redundant disks (Hardware Raid), redundant power supply, UPS systems, network bonding.

• Fully configured Proxmox_VE_2.0_Cluster, with 2 nodes.
• Shared storage (SAN for Virtual Disk Image Store for HA KVM). In this case, no external storage was used but DRBD.
• Reliable network, suitable configured
• NFS for Containers
• Fencing device(s) - reliable and TESTED!