50 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
50 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
# Frequently Asked Questions about Parallel Virtual Cluster
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## General Questions
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### What is it?
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PVC is a virtual machine management suite designed around high-availability. It can be considered an alternative to ProxMox, VMWare, Nutanix, and other similar solutions that manage not just the VMs, but the surrounding infrastructure as well.
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### Why would you make this?
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The full story can be found in the [about page](https://parallelvirtualcluster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/about), but after becoming frustrated by numerous other management tools, I discovered that what I wanted didn't exist as FLOSS software, so I built it myself.
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### Is PVC right for me?
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PVC might be right for you if your requirements are:
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1. You need KVM-based VMs.
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2. You want management of storage and networking (a.k.a. "batteries-included") in the same tool.
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3. You want hypervisor-level redundancy, able to tolerate hypervisor downtime seamlessly, for all elements of the stack.
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I built PVC for my homelab first, found a perfect usecase with my employer, and think it might be useful to you too.
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### Is 3 hypervisor really the minimum?
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For a redundant cluster, yes. PVC requires a majority quorum for several subsystems, and the smallest possible majority quorum is 2/3. That said, you can run PVC on a single node for testing/lab purposes without host-level reundancy.
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## Feature Questions
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### Does PVC support Docker/Kubernetes/LXC/etc.
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No. PVC supports only KVM VMs. To run Docker containers, etc., you would need to run a VM which then runs your containers.
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### Does PVC have a WebUI?
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Not yet. Right now, PVC management is done almost exclusively with an API and the included CLI interface to that API. A WebUI could and likely will be built in the future, but I'm not a frontend developer.
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## Storage Questions
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### Can I use RAID-5 with PVC?
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The short answer is no. The long answer is: Ceph, the storage backend used by PVC, does support "erasure coded" pools which implement a RAID-5-like functionality. PVC does not support this for several reasons. If you use PVC, you must accept at the very least a 2x storage penalty, and for true safety and resiliency a 3x storage penalty, for VM storage. This is a trade-off of the architecture.
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### Can I use spinning HDDs with PVC?
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You can, but you won't like the results. SSDs are effectively required to obtain any sort of reasonable performance when running multiple VMs. Ideally, datacentre-grade SSDs as well, due to their significantly increased write endurance.
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### What Ceph version does PVC use?
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PVC requires Ceph 14.x (Nautilus). The official PVC repository includes Ceph 14.2.8. Debian Buster by default includes only 12.x (Luminous).
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