Creating a PhoenixNAP BMC Proxmox VE Cluster
We are going to create a cluster with Proxmox VE using these bare metal cloud instances. We already showed the initial bring up, but one can go well beyond that. For example we launched ffive instances. Four are the s2.c2.medium instances with the Intel Xeon E-2388G processors and Intel SGX. The fifth server is the s0.d1.medium based on an Intel Xeon E3-1271 V3.
When creating clusters, one often wants to use an odd number of nodes so in a split scenario there can be a majority of nodes on one side of the split. Here, we are able to provision a node that costs less than a third the price to act as our fifth node simply to increase the robustness of the cluster.
Here is the cluster node running:
Here is one of the Xeon E-2388G nodes that is running a Ubuntu VM:
As one can see, there are also LXC containers that are being deployed on the cluster. This is a very powerful solution.
Just to give our readers some sense, the entire screen recording going through this process was only 22 minutes long. At the end of the 22 minutes five machines were deployed, 2-factor authentication was added, we had several installation ISOs downloaded in the cluster, several LXC container templates, Postgres and MySQL DB containers running, Ubuntu VMs running, and we were even migrating VMs.
For full transparency, we had someone on the STH team test it out a few weeks ago, so I knew it would work. Still, it was extremely straightforward. 0-cluster with deployed functions in 22 minutes. We even deleted a node via the PhoenixNAP console, and you can see that it is removed here.
One of the cool features is that we were able to delete the cluster after it was done since it was billed hourly.
We were using Proxmox VE here, but that could have been done on Ubuntu, Windows, VMware, or CentOS 7 as well.
Next, let us talk Intel SGX and Kubernetes with Rancher.
That proxmox cluster install was neat
I didn’t realize how much cheaper it is to go off AWS.
Is that Rancher feature new? I looked at this sometime in october or november but I didn’t see it then
Signing up didn’t work for me, the payment processor first refused my e-mail address for containing a plus, then it turns out the button to pay simply doesn’t work… So far I’m not impressed.
@Samir, we first launched our Rancher integration back in July last year, but we enabled HA cluster deployment and added additional features a couple of months ago.
@Nils, sorry to hear that. We might be able to help with the login and we’d definitely like to hear if something hasn’t worked for you. You can contact feedback@phoenixnap.com and let us know about your experience, so we know what we can fix.
nice ad
Got a working account now, there are quite a few rough edges but I’m still quite impressed by the level of current generation Hardware offered, not something you see everywhere.
Hi Patrick,
Are you able to push 5ghz on this CPU? I’m having difficulties in reaching the boost freq.
Any ideas why? BIOS config is set to turbo boost mode already.
Registration failed for me, the payment processor initially rejected my email address because it contained a plus sign, and it turns out that the button to pay simply doesn’t function.