Maxim Kazmin, 123R

Container and hardware e-virtualization under one roof

Double Sure

Article from ADMIN 02/2010

By Thomas Drilling

The Proxmox distribution specializes in virtualization, letting you deploy and manage virtual servers with OpenVZ and KVM at the same time.

The Proxmox Virtual Environment, or VE for short, is an open source project [1] that provides an easy-to-manage, web-based virtualization platform administrators can use to deploy and manage OpenVZ containers or fully virtualized KVM machines. In creating Proxmox, the developers have achieved their vision of allowing administrators to create a virtualization structure within a couple of minutes. The Proxmox bare-metal installer will convert virtually any PC into a powerful hypervisor for the two most popular open source virtualization technologies: KVM and OpenVZ.

The system lets you set up clusters comprising at least two physical machines (see the "Cluster Setup" box). One server always acts as the cluster master, to which you can assign other servers as nodes. This is not genuine clustering with load balancing, but the model does support centralized management of all the nodes in the cluster, even though the individual virtual machines in a Proxmox cluster are always assigned to one physical server. The clear-cut web interface facilitates the process of creating and managing virtual KVM machines or OpenVZ containers and live migration of virtual machines between nodes (Figure 1).