Category: Terraform

Howto: Automated FreeBSD VM Deployment with ProxLB and Terraform

(2024-09-01):
In today’s fast-paced IT environments, automation is essential for maintaining efficiency and staying competitive. Whether you're managing a small-scale infrastructure or an enterprise-level system, the ability to deploy virtual machines (VMs) quickly, consistently, and with minimal manual intervention can be transformative. This is where tools like ProxLB and Terraform come into play, offering a powerful solution for automating the deployment and management of VMs. Why Terraform and not Ansible? I'm aware that Ansible is a great tool - also for such things - but Ansible might be slow in some cases with too many tasks and not writing own custom modules that improve the overall handling. Terraform is often the better choice when it comes just to build up a base infrastructure from scratch where Ansible can take over after this baseline has been set. So, let's have a look at the other tools used here. ProxLB is a robust .... [read more]

ProxLB - (Re)Balance VM Workloads Across Nodes in Proxmox Clusters.

(2024-07-06):
ProxLB (PLB) is an open-source Proxmox loadbalancer, but different! ProxLB is an application created to optimize the distribution of virtual machines (VMs) across Proxmox cluster nodes for significantly enhancing efficiency and performance. Utilizing the Proxmox API, ProxLB gathers and analyzes a comprehensive set of resource metrics from both the cluster nodes and the running VMs, including CPU usage, memory consumption, and local disk utilization. A key feature of ProxLB is its intelligent rebalancing capability, which redistributes VMs based on their memory, disk, or CPU usage. In those cases, the real memory consumption from the VM is taken instead of the potential maximum usage. This ensures no single node is overburdened while others remain underutilized, significantly enhancing cluster performance and reliability. By evenly distributing resources, ProxLB helps prevent performance bottlenecks and improves the overall stability of the cluster. Efficient rebalancing leads to better utilization of available resources, potentially reducing the need .... [read more]