ProxmoxVE 2.0rc1 Notes:Setup

This is Part#1 of a series of posts on my experience with Proxmox 2.0rc1.

I was tasked to look for a suitable solution to build an internal cloud/virtualization infrastructure and I've decided to spend some time with ProxmoxVE 2.0rc1.

The list below is the hardware available to me:
2 desktop computers
Intel i3-530
4GB DDR3
1TB Hard drive

Things I want to try:
- benchmark disk/file IO performance of host system
- benchmark dis/file IO performance of guest system
- openvz live migration
- kvm live migration
- HA storage for the VM using DRBD
- ProxmoxVE HA i.e. guest starting on secondary node when primary node goes down
- openvz ubuntu server 10.04LTS guest running tomcat6 on sun-java6-jdk
- kvm ubuntu server 10.04LTS guest running tomcat6 on sun-java6-jdk

Installing ProxmoxVE 2.0rc1 on the hardware was fairly straight forward.
The installer took over the whole 1TB drive and partitioned it on its own.

running fdisk -l /dev/sda && df -Th revealed:
- /dev/sda1 is 495MB ext3 mounted on /boot
- dev/sda2 is 999.5GB LVM

running pvscan && vgscan revealed:
- /dev/sda2 was configured as an lvm2 physcial volume
- a volume group named pve was created by proxmox

running lvscan && mount revealed:
- a 4GB /dev/pve/swap volume was created for swap
- a 96GB /dev/pve/root ext3 volume mounted as the root file system
- a 899GB /dev/pve/data ext3 volume mounted on /var/lib/vz

Next I updated ProxmoxVE 2.0rc1 which is Debian based.
The host is behind a proxy server so to update I ran:

export http_proxy=http://10.0.0.1:3128

apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade

I proceeded to install some useful tools:
apt-get install screen dstat

Next, I configured NTP to sync to a time server on the local network

Next I downloaded an openvz template for ubuntu 10.04LTS and proceeded to create and run a guest.

I ran across an annoying bug while accessing the guest using the console. Tab completion was not working which made it difficult to work on the web console. I found a work around and made a separate post for the web console tab fix

Stay tuned for my next post in this series: Setting up DRBD backed storage even with just one hard disk

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