How do you handle Proxmox clusters when you only have 1 or 2 servers?
I technically have 3 servers but I keep one offline because I don’t need it 24/7 most point wasting power on a server I don’t need.
I believe I read somewhere that you can force Proxmox it to a lower number but it isn’t recommended. Has anyone done this and if so have you run into any issues with this?
My main issue is I want my VM to start no matter what. For example I had a power outage. When the servers came back online instead of starting they waited for the quorum number to reach 3. (it will never reach 3 because the third server wasn’t turn on.) so they just waited forever until I got home and ran
pvecm expected 2
I would argue that the node shouldn’t be in the cluster if its availability doesn’t match the others. If you remove the part-time node, your pvecm concerns go away.
Now, if you have a failure such that the other 2 nodes get restarted, you can manage the VM startups with delays. If one node completes booting 5 minutes before the other, then have the VMs wait 5 minutes or longer before auto-starting. That way, you’ll have your quorum when the VM starts.
You’ll need a QDevice to keep consensus. That wiki article will cover how to set it up and some drawbacks to QDevices. You should be able to run it on a low-power device like a Pi to keep the cluster going.
If you are not using any HA feature and only put servers into the same cluster for ease of management.
You could use the same command but with a value of 1.
The reason quorum exist is to prevent any server to arbitrarily failover VMs when it believes the other node(s) is down and create a split brain situation.
But if that risk does not exist to begin with, so do the quorum.
