[CentOS] Bare metal vs. virtualization: Proxmox + Ceph + CentOS ?

Sun Mar 14 06:13:13 UTC 2021
Nicolas Kovacs <info at microlinux.fr>

Hi,

Last week I had a disaster which took me a few unnerving days to repair. My
main Internet-facing server is a bare-metal installation with CentOS 7. It
hosts four dozen web sites (or web applications) based on WordPress, Dolibarr,
OwnCloud, GEPI, and quite a number of mail accounts for ten different domains.
On sunday afternoon this machine had a hardware failure and proved to be
unrecoverable.

The good news is, I always have backups of everything. In that case, I have a
dedicated backup server (in a different datacenter in a different country). I’m
using Rsnapshot for incremental backups, so I had all data: websites, mail
accounts, database dumps, configurations, etc.

Now here’s the problem: it took me three and a half days of intense work to
restore everything and get everything running again. Three and a half days of
downtime is quite a stretch.

As far as I understand, my mistake was to use a bare-metal installation and not
a virtualized solution where I could simply restore a snapshot of a VM. Correct
me if I’m wrong.

Now I’m doing a lot of thinking and searching. Proxmox and Ceph look quite
promising. From what I can tell, the idea is not to use a big server but a
cluster of many small servers, and aggregate them like you would do with hard
disks in a RAID 10 array for example, only you would do this for the whole
system. And then install one or several CentOS 7 VMs on top of this setup.

Any advice from the pros before I dive head first into the  documentation?

Cheers from the sunny South of France,

Niki

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