Hyper-converged Infrastructure
Proxmox VE is a virtualization platform that tightly integrates compute, storage and networking resources, manages highly available clusters, backup/restore as well as disaster recovery. All components are software-defined and compatible with one another.
Therefore it is possible to administrate them like a single system via the centralized web management interface. These capabilities make Proxmox VE an ideal choice to deploy and manage an open source hyper-converged infrastructure.
Benefits of a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) with Proxmox VE
A hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is especially useful for deployments in which a high infrastructure demand meets a low administration budget, for distributed setups such as remote and branch office environments or for virtual private and public clouds.
HCI provides the following advantages:
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Scalability: seamless expansion of compute, network and storage devices (i.e. scale up servers and storage quickly and independently from each other).
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Low cost: Proxmox VE is open source and integrates all components you need such as compute, storage, networking, backup, and management center. It can replace an expensive compute/storage infrastructure.
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Data protection and efficiency: services such as backup and disaster recovery are integrated.
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Simplicity: easy configuration and centralized administration.
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Open Source: No vendor lock-in.
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: Storage
Proxmox VE has tightly integrated support for deploying a hyper-converged storage infrastructure. You can, for example, deploy and manage the following two storage technologies by using the web interface only:
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Ceph: a both self-healing and self-managing shared, reliable and highly scalable storage system. Checkout how to manage Ceph services on Proxmox VE nodes
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ZFS: a combined file system and logical volume manager with extensive protection against data corruption, various RAID modes, fast and cheap snapshots - among other features. Find out how to leverage the power of ZFS on Proxmox VE nodes.
Besides above, Proxmox VE has support to integrate a wide range of additional storage technologies. You can find out about them in the Storage Manager chapter.