Proxmox HA Cluster

Building a data center-grade homelab with zero-single-point-of-failure.

Role Infrastructure Architect
Timeline 6 Months
Focus High Availability, Distributed Storage

The Challenge

The primary goal was to create a highly resilient virtualization environment that could survive the failure of any single physical node without impacting the availability of hosted services. This required solving three main problems:

  • Eliminating the single point of failure in the hypervisor layer.
  • Implementing shared storage that is synchronously replicated.
  • Designing an automated failover mechanism with low Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

The Solution

I implemented a 3-node Proxmox VE cluster utilizing Ceph as the distributed storage backend. Ceph allowed me to pool local NVMe drives across all nodes into a single, resilient storage cluster.

Technical Architecture

Implemented a Quorum-based voting system to prevent "split-brain" scenarios. Configured Corosync for cluster communication and utilized Proxmox HA Manager for automated VM migration.

The network was segmented into three distinct VLANs: Management, Cluster Communication, and VM Traffic, ensuring that high-volume storage replication didn't saturate the management plane.

Impact & Results

The resulting infrastructure provides a robust platform for critical home services and development environments.

99.9% Uptime
0 Single Points of Failure
< 30s Failover Time
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