Hypervisors

We initially considered using VMware as our hypervisor, but the price quotes were prohibitive. I had some experience with Xen in the past, but I was unsure about its suitability for production use. After further research, we were recommended an open-source hypervisor called Proxmox VE. This software strikes a good balance between cost (annual subscription) and the functionality we needed. Proxmox provides great stability and system management at a fraction of the cost that VMware was asking for. The learning curve for this new software was manageable and very doable.

Proxmox can create a cluster when you have more than one server and can manage your VMs and hardware across all your physical servers from a single dashboard without any extra management software. Everything management-related is synchronized across all the Proxmox nodes as long as you maintain quorum (more than half of your physical servers are operational, with a minimum operational system of 3 nodes). So, if you have 4 physical servers, you can lose one and still maintain quorum.

Next, we will discuss interacting with the hypervisor using a tool such as Terraform. For Proxmox, there is a driver/provider named Telmate/proxmox that communicates with the REST API endpoint of your Proxmox cluster and can spin up VMs and manage them. Please note that Proxmox also supports LXC (system containers) which are very fast and fun to use. We encountered some difficulties when trying to duplicate LXC templates using this provider though. We think we can have some workarounds, but they require patching the Telmate software, which we did not want to do at this time. Maybe we will come back to this problem later.